Talk:Universal Turing machine

message: This is clearly not original content.  Can anyone track down the original so it can be attributed, or at least so the footnotes point somewhere? Joshf 03:28, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Original content? 

message: Why no discussion, distinction, or reference, to the above? --Ludvikus (talk) 14:15, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Alternating Turing machine]] 

message: Universal Turing Machine states "Alan Turing introduced this machine in 1936–1937."
Turing Test says "The test was proposed by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, which opens with the words: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'"...
Did he invent the universal Turing machine before the Turning Test?
Possible. I don't know - just asking...
Jwichman (talk) 10:22, 7 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: He invented his machines (the basic machine and the Universal machine) in 1936, described them in his Master's thesis and professionally in a paper published in early 1937, and then published a follow-on (the Oracle machine) in 1939 in Princeton NJ for his PhD. He contributed to the Allies' WWII effort by cracking the German Enigma code-machines, and after the war contributed to one of the first true computers (I think it's the Manchester (U.K.) Mark I, or something like that). But after a scandal in the early 1950's he died by eating a poisoned apple. BillWvbailey (talk) 13:06, 7 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dates of invention don't match those in [[Turning Test]]  

message: Given that this is a mathematics article, I'm disappointed that it doesn't attempt to precisely define universal Turing machines, using instead only the vague term "simulation". I would have expected a definition that says that a TM U is universal iff there exists a total recursive TM Tr, taking a TM program P (appropriately encoded on tape), such that U(Tr(P)) halts iff P halts. In practice, one assumes something a little stronger: there must be a second total recursive function Tr', such that U(Tr(P,input)) halts iff P(input) halts, and Tr'(U(Tr(P,input))) = P(input) if P(input) halts. Note, however, that this requires a specific encoding of tapes with arbitrary alphabets. Erniecohen (talk) 13:35, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I haven't seen this definition, but if you have a source (sources) go ahead and add something to the "Mathematical Theory" section. BillWvbailey (talk) 18:02, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition? 

message: Historians are quite unanimous that Eckert and Mauchly were not aware of Turing's paper when they built the ENIAC.  Von Neumann definitely was (and he did advocate Turing's ideas elsewhere), but he only joined the ENIAC program at a late stage.  Already before Von Neumann joined the project, Eckert and Mauchly had started to consider ways to read the ENIAC program from various media (Eckert's papers and memos show this).  ENIAC was later converted to a stored-program computer.
It would be wrong to say that Turing's paper was the origin of the stored-program computer, as the fathers of that innovation most certainly didn't know about Turing's paper.  In addition, Babbage's machines already introduced the stored-program concept several decades before Turing's paper (Eckert and Mauchly weren't aware of Babbage's ideas either).  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.234.189.54 (talk) 07:27, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  TM:s Were Not the "Origin" of Stored-Program Computer 

message: UTMs are related to meta-circular interpreters.  Is this significant enough to mention in the article?
[I]t is worth noting that a Universal Turing Machine can be considered as simply a meta-interpreter incorporated within hardware. In this sense, meta-interpretation is one of, if not the most fundamental concept in Computer Science.(, also to appear in the Machine Learning Journal in 2015)
pgr94 (talk) 16:16, 25 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mention relation to meta-interpreters? 

message: "Turing machine computes a certain fixed partial computable function".  What does it mean, "machine computes"? 
"function from the input strings over its alphabet". The result of computation is a symbol on the tape? (The are many symbols on the tape. Which symbol is the value of function?)85.140.206.60 (talk) 10:15, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  machine computes