How many of you like HP41C calculators?

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Thu Nov 20 13:53:29 2003

On Wed, 2003-11-19 at 21:14, William R. Buckley wrote:

> In the case of Turing closure, the notion is much broader. Turing closure
> refers
> to the ability of a system to perform any and all computations that can be
> expressed. Now, there are problems with this notion, since Godel has shown
> that some expressible computations in fact can not be computed. Still, the
> general notion is: all that can be computed is computable upon a TM, and a
> TM
> is capable of computing all computations.

Yes, this is correct, and close to what turing wrote in the '36 paper.

> The real key to understanding the theory of computation is to understand the
> works of the mathematician David Hilbert, the logicians Kurt Godel, Alonzo
> Church, Stephen Cole Kleene, and Emil Post, the linguist Noam Chomsky,
> and the mathematician Alan Mathison Turing.

Eh, it's not that hard. Machine modifies it's own program. What's the
big deal? :-)
Received on Thu Nov 20 2003 - 13:53:29 GMT