Impressive result by Alex Smith!
Funny though how Wolfram's web sites on this
print Wolfram's name in larger font and more
frequently than Smith's, even trying to sell this
as "New Kind Of Science" although it's just a
continuation of a decades-old search for
small universal Turing machines :-)
BTW, check out Marcus Hutter's older posting to
the Kolmogorov Complexity mailing list on whether
such machines should really count as UTMs or not:
http://mailman.ti-edu.ch/pipermail/kolmogorov/2007/000245.html
JS
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/wolfram.html
On Oct 24, 2007, at 8:32 PM, Tom Caylor wrote:
> We're excited to announce that the $25,000 Wolfram 2,3 Turing Machine
> Research Prize has been won.
> Alex Smith, a 20-year-old undergraduate in Birmingham, UK, has given a
> 40-page proof that Wolfram's 2,3 Turing machine is indeed universal.
> This result ends a half-century quest to find the simplest possible
> universal Turing machine. It also provides strong further evidence for
> Wolfram's Principle of Computational Equivalence. The official prize
> ceremony is planned for November at Bletchley Park, UK, site of Alan
> Turing's wartime work.
> For more information about the prize and the solution, see:
> http://www.wolframprize.org
> Stephen Wolfram has posted his personal reaction to the prize at:
> http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/10/the_prize_is_won_the_simplest.html
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Received on Fri Oct 26 2007 - 10:21:11 PDT