Impressive result by Alex Smith! Funny though how Wolfram's web sites on this print Wolfram's name in larger font and more frequently than Smith's, even trying to sell this as "New Kind Of Science" although it's just a continuation of a decades-old search for small universal Turing machines :-)
BTW, check out Marcus Hutter's older posting to the Kolmogorov Complexity mailing list on whether such machines should really count as UTMs or not: http://mailman.ti-edu.ch/pipermail/kolmogorov/2007/000245.html JS http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/wolfram.html On Oct 24, 2007, at 8:32 PM, Tom Caylor wrote:
We're excited to announce that the $25,000 Wolfram 2,3 Turing Machine Research Prize has been won. Alex Smith, a 20-year-old undergraduate in Birmingham, UK, has given a 40-page proof that Wolfram's 2,3 Turing machine is indeed universal. This result ends a half-century quest to find the simplest possible universal Turing machine. It also provides strong further evidence for Wolfram's Principle of Computational Equivalence. The official prize ceremony is planned for November at Bletchley Park, UK, site of Alan Turing's wartime work. For more information about the prize and the solution, see: http://www.wolframprize.org Stephen Wolfram has posted his personal reaction to the prize at: http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/10/the_prize_is_won_the_simplest.html
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
