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A comment on Wolfram: The Simplest Universal Turing Machine is proven by 20 year old student.

Re:Wolfram: The Simplest Universal Turing Machine is proven ... by jimbokun on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @12:11PM (#72099)
"It's just that in our normal efforts of engineering, we've been too constrained to see with such things."

Who is he referring to here? Pretty much any CS or ECE student will encounter the Turing machine at some point. Wolfram talks like he is the only one aware of something that I'm sure is common knowledge among the "normal" engineers responsible for creating the computing machines we use every day.

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Re:Wolfram: The Simplest Universal Turing Machine is proven ... by programnature on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @01:05PM (#72127)
That quote is pretty vague, but I don't think he is trying to say that people haven't heard of Turing machines, which they obviously have.

I think the point is that "textbook" turing machines, just like other "textbook" forms of engineering, are typically constructed by hand, top-down to have a specific, predictable behavior.

What is interesting about Alex Smith's proof is that it implements the reverse approach, starting with an empirical discovery of the 'natural primitives' of the emergent behavior and building up the construction from the bottom up.

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