Re:Hypercomputation: Computing more than the Turing machine ...
by Boxxed on Tuesday September 12, 2017 @02:48PM
(#15230344)
I think you're confusing "states" with cells on the tape. They are completely independent. All turing machines have an unbounded tape, but a well-defined number of states that act as an automaton controlling the head on the tape.
Noting this a few more states than a handful are possible. For example my laptop with bitpacking could track the visited or not visited flag for 64000000000 states without even using disk. Tracking a 33 bit FSM.
I agree though that linear bounded Turing machines having a solution for the halting problem is not actually that useful for real computers considering by the time a few registers had been iterated over the sun would have exploded.