turing-machines

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers. Learn more . Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow. I do not the understand the concept of Non Deterministic Turing Machine . I guess I understand the term Non deterministic algorithm : (nondeterministic algorithm is an algorithm that can exhibit different behaviors on different runs, as opposed to a deterministic algorithm.) So the algorithm could be like : a = fromSomeAlgo(); if(a > foo) stateA(); else stateB(); But for non-deterministic turing machine I read , it can

While reading the reviews for Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" on Amazon, I came across the following statement: Every computer science (CS) student knows the dovetailer, a very simple 2 line program that systematically lists and executes all possible programs for a universal computer such as a Turing machine (TM). Can someone give a "simple 2 line program" which illustrates "dovetaling"? A CS student usually has on hand an encoding of Turing machines to integers, which they need when they write their software Turing machine emulator that takes as input a Turing machine, and writes as

What is a Turing machine and why do people keep mentioning it? My IBM PC is all I need to do my computation! Why does anyone care about these machines? The reason that Turing Machines are a big deal has to do with the study of classical Computing Science or Theory of Computation type stuff. It's basically about analyzing the general properties of a computer, such as what theoretical abilities and limitations a computer has, as well as what we mean when we talk about "computing" something. One example of something that one might study using Turing Machines is The Halting Problem . While this

When have you ever personally come upon the halting problem in the field? This can be when a co-worker / boss suggested a solution which would violate the fundamental limits of computation, or when you realized yourself that a problem you were trying to solve was, in fact, impossible to solve. The most recent time I came up with it was when studying type checkers. Our class realized that it would be impossible to write a perfect type checker (one that would accept all programs that would run without type errors, and reject all programs that would run with type errors) because this would, in

What does the expression "Turing Complete" mean? Can you give a simple explanation, without going into too many theoretical details? Here's the briefest explanation: A Turing Complete system means a system in which a program can be written that will find an answer (although with no guarantees regarding runtime or memory). So, if somebody says "my new thing is Turing Complete" that means in principle (although often not in practice) it could be used to solve any computation problem. Sometime's it's a joke... a guy wrote a Turing Machine simulator in vi, so it's possible to say that vi is the