hi all,

has the question if SPARQL is linear bounded automaton complete (or Turing
complete in the colloquial sense) been settled? I am a bit confused about
the fine points. How about this:

http://www.brunni.de/sparql_abuse.html#turing

> By putting a limit on the tape size, we can emulate a Turing machine with one 
> SPARQL UPDATE query followed by one normal SPARQL query - in a quite 
> impractical way. The basic idea is to generate all possible state transitions 
> and then to search through them with property paths.
[...]
> If the first SPARQL UPDATE query generates all state transitions for a 
> universal linear bounded automaton (a Turing machine with finite tape 
> emulating a Turing machine described on its tape), you can execute any 
> program that fits into the tape just by doing the second query.
>
> This does not seem to be feasible with modern hardware (e.G. a tape size of 
> 40 bits for the universal Turing machine) and even if it were, the 
> calculations enabled by this would only be able to manipulate a handful of 
> bits. 

A friend says this is cheating because it combines impractically big resources
for the SPARQL engine (at least in the universal case) with impractically small
computations enabled by it.

Also, the exact wording maybe has to be that 

1) the combination of two queries

or

2) one query and a (hypothetical) endpoint with the pre-generated state
   transitions for the universal case
 
are linear bounded automaton complete.

There seems to be another option for emulation of a Turing machine: Put a 
limit N on the number of computation steps and construct a query with at least
N nested subselects using operators like IF().

Would this constitute completeness?

Regards,

Michael Brunnbauer

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