Prize Announced for Determining the Boundaries of Turing Machine Computation
May 16, 2007 | Source: KurzweilAI
Wolfram Research and Stephen Wolfram has announced the establishment of a US $25,000 prize for the first person or group to prove (or disprove) that a particular very simple Turing machine can act as a universal computer.
Is this Turing machine universal, or not? The machine has 2 states and 3 colors, and is 596440 in Wolfram's numbering scheme. If it is universal, then it represents the smallest possible universal Turing machine.
Today’s computers have CPUs with millions of components. But it is known in theory that much simpler systems are also capable of “universal computation,” which means that with appropriate programming, they could perform any computation.
The aim of the Wolfram 2,3 Turing Machine Research Prize announced today is to determine the edge of where universal computation is possible.
