Universal Turing machine

In computer science, a universal Turing machine (UTM) is a Turing machine capable of computing any computable sequence, as described by Alan Turing in his seminal paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem". Common sense might say that a universal machine is impossible, but Turing proves that it is possible. He suggested that we may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions q 1: q 2 . .... qI; which will be called "m-configurations". He then described the operation of such machine, as described below, and argued:

It is my contention that these operations include all those which are used in the computation of a number.

"Universal machine" redirects here. For other uses, see Universal machine (disambiguation).

Turing machines
Machine
Variants
Science

Alan Turing introduced the idea of such a machine in 1936–1937. This principle is considered to be the origin of the idea of a stored-program computer used by John von Neumann in 1946 for the "Electronic Computing Instrument" that now bears von Neumann's name: the von Neumann architecture.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.