I heard from a math grad student at Princeton that there's some really weird drama behind Wolfram and some of his proofs.

Apparently someone working at Wolfram labs discovered a one dimensional, universal Turing equivalent cellular automata, announced it, and then tried to publish it under his own name. Wolfram apparently sued to keep him from ever speaking of the proof, but the court documents _included_ speaking to Wolfram about it.

So for about a year (or more?), there was a universal Turing machine, but no proof.

I guess this is a different machine, but it still seems really sketchy.