I rather like the idea of "if/then/goto" as an analogue of "past/present/future". A "comparator" biases based on "past" state and a "present" event then selects a "future" condition.
I believe that we can agree that we can create a Turing-complete system from carefully chosen symbols, however this is again only symbolic software. Luminaries like Church and Turning have proven this possible. I only suggest that there exists a minimum hardware to represent a Turing-complete symbolic system. Possibly we could even call this a
Theory of Computing.
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| Turtle powered entropic logic!
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Any hardware model is only the lower bound of such a system, from on up its all turtles. I think we could prove that infinite memory isn't a requirement either, only enough memory to represent your Turing-complete symbolic system, and the program itself.
Likely that this is old news to a gear-twizzling clock-puter curator such as yourself. But for the benefit of all interested readers, here is a discussion of a theoretically minimal turing machine...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/reference%20articles/what%20is%20a%20turing%20machine.html#head
I made this for you, mystery man. Enjoy!
ReplyDeletehttp://fractalclockwork.blogspot.com/2012/04/grey-goo-hollerith-edition.html