4 Replies to “A Real Turing Machine”

  1. Cool, but it’s a bit silly that there has to be a lot more processing power in the computer that runs the thing than in the Turing machine itself.

  2. That’s the nature of computational universality! Even a linear overhead is embarrassing when you look at it carefully enough.

  3. It’s like making a 32-qubit quantum computer and using it to simulating the flipping of a coin.
    Intermediate in silliness, there was that Russian computer science guy, decades ago, who determined that the optimum base for computer arithmetic was e. Since e is closer to 3 than to 2, he suggested that flip-flap-flop circuits would be better than flip-flop circuits. So an institute built a fundemantally trinary computer. Then the software team mapped 3^3 = 27 into 10 digits plus some punctuation, and did everything very inefficiently in decimal arithmetic.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *