Tags / 5 quotes from 2 sources
#turing-machine
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
The mind as a symbol-manipulating machine
Since Turing’s time, cognitive science has also assumed the mind to be a symbol-manipulating machine, an analogy to the abstract mathematical Turing machine. But as the example of computers that can play chess illustrates, how a computer does math and how a human does math may…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
The Turing machine as an abstract concept
A Turing machine is a device that carries out calculations using only two types of symbols. These are usually thought of as zeros and ones, but any symbols will do. The idea of the Turing machine was invented by Alan Turing, the great British logician and mathematician. The…
The Church-Turing thesis
Due originally to Alonzo Church (arrived at independently by Turing, so sometimes called the Church-Turing Thesis), this thesis states that any problem that has an algorithmic solution can be solved on a Turing machine. Or another way to say the same thing is that any algorithm…
The brain as a universal Turing machine
Turing, in an important mathematical result known as Turing’s Theorem, proved that there is a Universal Turing machine that can simulate the behavior of any other Turing machine. More precisely, Turing proved that there is a Universal Turing machine, UTM, such that for any…
Big problems decompose into simple ones
Yet another important idea, already implicit in what I have said, is that big complex problems can be broken down into little simple problems, which can be broken down into even simpler problems, until we reach the level of ultimate simplicity. Doing multiplication with several…