

Wolfram: The Simplest Universal Turing Machine is proven by 20 year old student - rms
http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/10/the_prize_is_won_the_simplest.html

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whacked_new
I am not familiar with Wolfram's style, but there seemed to be an unsatisfying
lack of Alex Smith, but lots of Me, NKS, and PCE, in that post. The headline
deserves note because the proof is by a 20-yo but the post doesn't do him
justice.

Interesting nevertheless and I hope to get to read more news about the author.

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Nate
There are always two underlying themes in all Wolfram's writings:

1) Wolfram is a genius: the next Newton.

2) Buy Mathematica.

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dangph
He really is a genius though.

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koolmoe
I found this part interesting:

 _"I asked him why he'd worked on it. He said he'd seen it as a nice puzzle.
That at first he was pretty sure the Turing machine's behavior was simple
enough that he could prove that it wasn't universal. But then, as he studied
it, he realized that there were little bits of behavior that were more
complicated. And it was with these that he managed to show universality."_

Just another data point in favor of tinkering, I guess.

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jimbokun
"It's just that in our normal efforts of engineering, we've been too
constrained to see with such things."

Who is he referring to here? Pretty much any CS or ECE student will encounter
the Turing machine at some point. Wolfram talks like he is the only one aware
of something that I'm sure is common knowledge among the "normal" engineers
responsible for creating the computing machines we use every day.

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programnature
That quote is pretty vague, but I don't think he is trying to say that people
haven't heard of Turing machines, which they obviously have.

I think the point is that "textbook" turing machines, just like other
"textbook" forms of engineering, are typically constructed by hand, top-down
to have a specific, predictable behavior.

What is interesting about Alex Smith's proof is that it implements the reverse
approach, starting with an empirical discovery of the 'natural primitives' of
the emergent behavior and building up the construction from the bottom up.

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DaniFong
I heard from a math grad student at Princeton that there's some really weird
drama behind Wolfram and some of his proofs.

Apparently someone working at Wolfram labs discovered a one dimensional,
universal Turing equivalent cellular automata, announced it, and then tried to
publish it under his own name. Wolfram apparently sued to keep him from ever
speaking of the proof, but the court documents _included_ speaking to Wolfram
about it.

So for about a year (or more?), there was a universal Turing machine, but no
proof.

I guess this is a different machine, but it still seems really sketchy.

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jey
Where's the paper? And most importantly, how the hell did he go about proving
that?

Published proofs are often so opaque, but I always wonder what the mental
thought process was to get to the proof. What were you tinkering with, what
were the failures, etc

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DocSavage
Here's the paper: <http://www.wolframscience.com/prizes/tm23/TM23Proof.pdf>

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jey
Awesome, thanks

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amichail
Did all the members of the prize committee agree that this submission should
win? Or did Wolfram make the final call based on their feedback?

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lst
I'll reserve my surprise for the first time someone using this nice theory in
some real, traceable experiment...

