Talk:Wolfram's 2-state 3-symbol Turing machine

message: I'm unsure how to read the table. For example take this column:
:
input 	1,2
output	1,1,-1
I'm reading the following: if you're in state 1 and reading color 2 then set your state to 1, write color 1 and move head one cell to the left.
: Yeah I think that's right; if not, I hope a locician/algorithmist corrects us. But you probably want to read the article about Turing Machines. (I would have said "move tape one cell to the left" but it amounts to equivalent thing.) Pete St.John (talk) 21:11, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: How to read

message: I have cited Minsky and Bobrow (1961) in support of the fact that (2,2) is not universal, but cannot find the reference (neither Minksy nor Bobrow have complete CVs on the web). Would someone please add this reference to the entry?132.181.160.42 05:30, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I am happy to see Minsky (1967) cited until further notice. I wish no more than a reference to the non-universality of (2,2) machines under the conventional assumptions made in the literature over the past several decades, including finite input. Because Alex Smith and Wolfram will, ultimately, be judged by those assumptions. You cannot enjoy the freedom to move goalposts and to declare yourself the winner...132.181.160.42 04:34, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Minsky and Bobrow (1961)

message: Further to the subject of sockpuppetry: note that User:210.54.245.44, who made a number of edits regarding the Pratt controversy, was just blocked for edit warring that involved the use of a sock puppet (User:Rabidly Placid). --Pleasantville 21:12, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Lots of articles get victimized by various kinds of vandalism. So far I've only seen vandalism (e.g. inserting "megalomaniacal" repeatedly into the Wolfram article) but not fraud (as in, voting more than once on an issue by logging into multiple accounts). I agree that it seems to be most, or all, "Pro Pratt" doing it, why I attributed it to silly undergraduates. That said, I just want to add that while I've been criticised from "both sides", I've also gotten some nice civial cordiality from both sides, particularly you, and I thank you for it. Both sides have brilliant mathematicians, both sides have fair-minded people, but only one side is saddled with armies of idiot undergraduates. Not sure who's better off on that score. Pete St.John 21:53, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, note that User:Concerned cynic has just been banned indefinitely  for sock-puppetry as of last night. --Pleasantville 16:27, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Makes sense to me. The excuses we implied in addressing him (one that his browser was broken, mine that he doesn't know how to use preview/save) sounded, even to me as I composed one, that he was just making excuses after the fact for deliberate vandalism. I think the fellow has some issues, but dunno what they may be. Pete St.John 17:13, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Pleasantville! Maybe you could help us with the Erdos Number controversy?! See Mikkalai's userspace discussion and  the discussion at the Wiki Proj Math where I wrote reasons to reverse the deletion subsection. Mathematicians shouldn't be fighting each other, we should be fighting the English Majors :-) But seriously, the admin who ruled "deleted" (on the third attempted vote, and without an apparent concensus), who then got stormed with whining from mathematicians, got exasperated and quit (seemingly). Generally, all the mathematicians are annoyed/uproarious about it, but have no concensus what to do about it, as it's a political problem and not a math problem. Maybe all of us arguing here could be on the same side there, which would be kinda cool. Pete St.John 17:13, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sockpuppetry 

message: A recent change was described in the Edit Summary as "style edits, no change in content" but that's a bit misleading; nothing horrible, but in scientific work there is an important difference between "finding" something and "describing" something. Several of the changes in wording slightly shift the sense at a few points. I didn't notice any one point that I myself wanted to flatly contradict (e.g. I'm not up on authorship credit for (n,k) Turing Machines for any (n,k), myself) but I'll drop a note at the (anonymous IP) talk page (sigh). Pete St.John (talk) 21:18, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I am inching in the direction of an RfC regarding the collective oeuvre of that contributor over the course of his participation in WIkipedia. --Pleasantville (talk) 21:42, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The "describe" version in the new edits is, I think, more accurate, as the (2,5)-machine in question was actually found not by Wolfram but by Matthew Cook. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:48, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Oh I didn't mean to imply that his edits made the article worse. The problem to me is that the Edit Summary was misleading; you agree that the (better) word "describe" is significantly different, and factual from references, compared to "find", so it's not a stylistic difference. This contributor doesn't seem malicious, quite the contrary, but the summary was misleading and I sure wish they'd create a user account and talk to us. And it looks like Pleasantville has a point, because on their talk page I noticed a reference to the same thing (misleading Edit Summary) from a year ago. This may be one of those things where the contributor is oblivious to the contributors, and is just responding to the impersonal ascii stream. Or something else, dunno, but inconvenient. We should all be worrying about important things, like the Erdos Number Categories :-) And maybe E8. Actually, E8xE8xE8. Pete St.John (talk) 22:49, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

text:  David Eppstein, your assertion is false from many points of view, including the legal. But in particular, the (2,5) machine was not made by Cook, it is true that it is based in rule 110 but the (2,5) machine was by far not made by Cook. Furthermore, Cook was under a research contract and if you think that is different to what happens in universities or advisors-students relationships you do not know the field, you are too naive or too bad-intentioned by saying that. However, Wolfram's rule 110 first conjecture and his own work on the particular subject regarding its universality gives him all the rights to claim credit on the proof, but if you insist to acknowledge Cook then perhaps you should also acknowledge all the people that participated in Wolfram's NKS book as research assistants to him.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.125.177.239 (talk) 23:47, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  small changes but... 

message: It seems to me that the discussion of Vaughan Pratt's objections in the article is inadequate. Pratt gives examples in which seemingly trivial modifications to a tape (such as adding a single symbol) can in some circumstances turn a non-universal machine into a universal machine. He gives an example with two independent heads  and another example with a single head and a two-dimensional "tape" .
In Smith's construction, the tape is initialized with a non-repeating (triangular) pattern. Pratt points out that this resembles adding a counter to the machine. But we know that adding a counter can turn a non-universal machine (a one-counter register machine) into a universal one.
Smith's reply  appeals to our intuition about universality: surely, he argues, if the "initial condition is done in a highly computationally simple manner" then it is "intuitively reasonable that the system is universal". But Pratt's examples make it clear that our intuitions are suspect in this area: what could be simpler than adding a single symbol to a tape?
There's a good summary from Clive Gifford . Gdr 23:24, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: There was a good bit of discussion about this at the time of the news-release. A very good bit :-) The current wording is in the nature of a compromise. My own view is basically that the language natural in a business' press release is overstatement compared to what one expects in academia (and BTW that an encyclopedia should aim more towards the academic standards of scholarship; really, we're an amateur component of academia). That is, I blame the wording of the press-release for overstating the claims. If the words "universal", "turing", and "machine" were all redefined arbitrarily, plainly any statement would be vapid; but the extensions employed in Smith's paper are not entirely arbitrary. There's good work in there, just the public claims in the press-release are overblown. I wrote about it at in my notes. But by all means, feel free to suggest specific improvements in the coverage, and thanks for asking first. We definitely want to be more civil here than the flamewars at the religious-convictions articles, such as "vi vs emacs" :-) Pete St.John (talk) 16:54, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

text: The sentence Smith's proof has unleashed a debate on the precise operational conditions a Turing machine must satisfy in order for it to be candidate universal machine does not, IMO, sufficient suggest that Smith's defintions for e.g. "Universal" are expansions of convention in the literature (but I'm not qualified to assert that myself). I was hoping that the paper, or a substantial version, would be submitted for review at some point, then we'd have plenty to cite. But sure, if the function D were noncomputable, nonhalting, whatever, then such should not be claimed for T. What I'd really like (myself) is a good statement of Smith's result, better than "Smith proves that a Turing (in the sense of Wolfram) machine is Universal (in the sense of Smith)", and then contrast that with the (overblown) wording of the press release. But simplest, is to quote a more recent review, if there is one. Pete St.John (talk) 19:58, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

text: Do you mean that Smith does not explicitly state his definition(s), or that no self-consistent definition is possible, that would comprise all his assumptions? Pete St.John (talk) 22:17, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

text: The optimistic theory is that a good statement with correct proofs will come out of Smith's work, and it will be contributory. As it stands, Smith's work is not in publishable form. The press release made too much of it, but that's normal promotional language in business. The wiki should distinguish established proofs of unambiguous theorems from other things, but acknowledge the existence of other things :-). The current wording of the article indicates the imperfection of the work, but I'd agree is imbalanced. On the other hand, I don't think it's necessary or desirable to dismiss the work, either. If you propose a specific sentence to change or include, that would be cool to me. Hopefully other people besides just you and me still care :-) and will chip in. Pete St.John (talk) 19:06, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discussion of objections is inadequate 

message: The intro (and title) seems more interested in promoting the reputation of Stephen Wolfram than following ,  or [WP:MOS]. Does he really need to be mentioned in the title, and before the name of the automaton in the intro?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 219.73.77.123 (talk) 01:36, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  What the hell is going on with the intro? 

message: If we're going to use the pictures from the Wolfram page, then the state table should use the same state symbols as the pictures.  Otherwise, we should have pictures that use A, B or what ever state names we designate.  Asmeurer (talk  ♬ contribs) 05:21, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. 79.74.178.19 (talk) 23:30, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The table in the 'description' section here is incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with formal accounts of Turing machines.  The state table in the formal definition section of the Turing machine article on the other hand is self-explanatory and I suggest that a similar table be used here. --Brian Josephson (talk) 11:15, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

text: It turns out to be very easy to rewrite the description so as to be clear, and I have amended the article accordingly. --Brian Josephson (talk) 17:54, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  State table 

message: In an article about undecidability in this month's issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Chaim Goodman-Strauss recommends this talk page as introduction to the controversy about the proof:
:The interested reader can ask for no better starting point than the talk page of the relevant Wikipedia article [46], following the many outward links from there.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 07:36, 9 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Amusingly, I wonder if this is the first academic article citing a wikipedia talk page as a reference! Surely one of the first! But seriously, this seems like just about the best place to begin for understanding the issues and viewpoints surrounding this construction. C Goodman-Strauss (talk) 14:27, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  This talk page recommended in Notices of the AMS