Dave Hudson

hashingit.com

Alan Turing's paper on computable numbers

2020-04-12 10:34 - 1 min read

After 40+ years of writing software and a stint designing CPU instruction sets I finally got around to reading Alan Turing’s 1936 paper on computable numbers.

This has led to me a huge amount of research about Universal Turing Machines (UTMs) and that there are so many different designs. Most interesting are the searches for minimal UTMs (smallest numbers of states, symbols and tapes).

Some interesting pages:

One of the more interesting thoughts for me is the idea of TM’s description number. The idea of a number to describe a particular computation seems quite appealing

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