The Wolfram 2,3 Turing Machine Research Prize - Announcement
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg82611] The Wolfram 2,3 Turing Machine Research Prize - Announcement
- From: egalois <hzenilc at gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 05:19:50 -0400 (EDT)
________________________________________________________________ Prize Announcement THE WOLFRAM 2,3 TURING MACHINE RESEARCH PRIZE October 24th, 2007 http://www.wolframprize.org ________________________________________________________________ The Prize Is Won: The Simplest Universal Turing Machine Is Proved It has been a long time since Alan Turing's original 1936 paper about universal Turing machines. In 2002, Stephen Wolfram identified a candidate for the smallest universal Turing machine, from a search of the 2,985,984 2-state 3-color possibilities. As of today, we know that Wolfram's 2,3 Turing machine actually is universal. On May 14, 2007, as part of the fifth anniversary of Wolfram's book A New Kind of Science, a $25,000 research prize was announced for determining whether or not the Wolfram 2,3 Turing machine was in fact universal. Only five months later, that prize has now been won, ending a quest of more than half a century to find the very simplest universal Turing machine. Alex Smith, a 20-year-old undergraduate in Birmingham, UK, has given a proof that Wolfram's 2,3 Turing machine is indeed universal. He has a background in mathematics and esoteric programming languages. This universality proof is also another piece of evidence for Wolfram's general Principle of Computational Equivalence. The official prize ceremony is planned for November at Bletchley Park, UK, site of Alan Turing's wartime work. For more information about the prize and the solution, see: http://www.wolframprize.org Stephen Wolfram has posted his personal reaction to the prize at: http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/10/the_prize_is_won_the_simplest.html -- The Wolfram Science Group http://www.wolframscience.com