non-binary computers?

From: David C. Jenner <djenner_at_halcyon.com>
Date: Fri Sep 3 10:55:01 1999

Ahhh! It's nice to see someone is awake!

You do need to have some way of delineating the data you are crunching.
Feynman does this in the context of a Turing machine, where he writes
"tape marks" of arbitrary content, but specific significance, to indicate
the state of the process.

Eric Smith wrote:
>
> > The ultimate, of course, is the UNARY computer. If you look in the
> > "Feynman Lectures on Computation", Richard Feynman, 1996, you'll see
> > that he has you start designing a unary computer. Maybe not so easy
> > when all you have to work with is "1"! (It has to have a variable
> > word length, of course).
>
> When all you have are ones (and nothing else to represent the absence of
> a one), what do you use to delimit the start and end of variable-length
> words?
Received on Fri Sep 03 1999 - 10:55:01 BST