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General Computer Science 320201 GenCS I & II Lecture ... - Kwarc

General Computer Science 320201 GenCS I & II Lecture ... - Kwarc

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Post production systems ([Post])<br />

Turing machines ([Turing])<br />

Random-access machine<br />

Conjecture 482 ([Church/Turing]) (unprovable, but accepted)<br />

Anything that can be computed at all, can be computed by a Turing Machine<br />

Definition 483 We will call a computational system Turing complete, iff it can compute<br />

what a Turing machine can.<br />

c○: Michael Kohlhase 331<br />

Note that the Church/Turing hypothesis is a very strong assumption, but it has been born out by<br />

experience so far and is generally accepted among computer scientists.<br />

The Church/Turing hypothesis is strengthened by another concept that Alan Turing introduced<br />

in [Tur36]: the universal turing machine – a Turing machine that can simulate arbitrary Turing<br />

machine on arbitrary input. The universal Turing machine achieves this by reading both the Turing<br />

machine specification T as well as the I input from its tape and simulates T on I, constructing<br />

the output that T would have given on I on the tape. The construction itself is quite tricky (and<br />

lengthy), so we restrict ourselves to the concepts involved.<br />

Some researchers consider the universal Turing machine idea to be the origin of von Neumann’s<br />

architecture of a stored-program computer, which we explored in Subsection 3.4.0.<br />

Universal Turing machines<br />

Note: A Turing machine computes a fixed partial string function.<br />

In that sense it behaves like a computer with a fixed program.<br />

Idea: we can encode the action table of any Turing machine in a string.<br />

try to construct a Turing machine that expects on its tape<br />

a string describing an action table followed by<br />

a string describing the input tape, and then<br />

computes the tape that the encoded Turing machine would have computed.<br />

Theorem 484 Such a Turing machine is indeed possible (e.g. with 2 states, 18 symbols)<br />

Definition 485 Call it a universal Turing machine (UTM). (it can simulate any TM)<br />

UTM accepts a coded description of a Turing machine and simulates the behavior of the<br />

machine on the input data.<br />

187

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