Timeline for Is VonNeumann's universal constructor ontologically distinct from the universal Turing machine?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Apr 22, 2023 at 3:51 | history | edited | J D |
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| Apr 22, 2023 at 3:41 | answer | added | J D | timeline score: 1 | |
| May 21, 2021 at 16:34 | comment | added | hide_in_plain_sight | @Ajax. But that last sentence opens a gap. Life works in a theoretically continuous medium. So jumping from Cellular Automata to similar physical processes does lose some force. There may be things that one can do in continuous space, even with largely discrete components like DNA, that cannot be simulated adequately well in discrete mathematics. | |
| May 21, 2021 at 16:30 | answer | added | J Kusin | timeline score: 3 | |
| May 21, 2021 at 16:29 | comment | added | hide_in_plain_sight | @DoubleKnot. You don't have to leave this open because Church's Thesis is unresolveable. From a mathematical point of view, if I can do A with B and B with A, then A and B are equally powerful. Period. | |
| May 21, 2021 at 10:51 | comment | added | Ajax | von Neumann's "Computer and the Brain" is one such resource. Turing's universal machine is a general framework of computation. Neumann added a functionality of self-replication (universal constructor) which, as I understand, is implementable using Turing's formalism. The point is that Turing's machine is a "general" representation of what it means to follow a rule. Even with univ-constructor the idea is same -storing the code of the constructor and life within the current version of machine, and then following a rule to generate next. And life replication is clearly a mechanical process. | |
| May 21, 2021 at 4:21 | comment | added | Double Knot | Here (researchgate.net/publication/…). "von Neumann's universal constructors holds a close similarity to universal computers that appear in Turing's original proof of the undecidability of the halting problem...This attempt will never be completed because of the indefinite cascade of self-computation, which accounts for the undecidability of the halting problem and also agrees well with the fact that life has maintained its reproductive activity for an indefinitely long period of time." | |
| May 21, 2021 at 3:00 | comment | added | hide_in_plain_sight | I am deleting the comment. if you want to dismiss experience as conjecture, I am not willing to play along. The construction for VonNeumann's machine is published in. "The Theory of Self-Replicating Automata". I don't have it, but I have implemented it. It is a Universal Turing Machine, and as a Cellular Automaton, it can be no more powerful than that. | |
| May 21, 2021 at 1:10 | comment | added | CriglCragl | @hide_in_plain_sight: References? Can you relate to things Turing or VonNeumann said, or comments since? I'm looking for more than conjecture. Chiara is saying there is a key difference, & she sounds convincing. But, I don't understand what it is | |
| May 20, 2021 at 23:55 | history | asked | CriglCragl | CC BY-SA 4.0 |