4 ms·
My first question is, could this have been made at the time Babbage was trying to build the Analytical Engine, which (had he completed it) would have been the f
by SilasX 6y ago
My first question is, could this have been made at the time Babbage was trying to build the Analytical Engine, which (had he completed it) would have been the first Turing-complete machine? Would it have accomplished the same practical results (at least with some scale-up)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine
- gostsamo 6y agoYour question reminds me of a russian humorous story somewhere from the 90s or early 00s. Called "Wooden Computational Machine", it describes an wooden computer created for the russian zar and the chaos that ensues. The author is called Maxim Samohvalov, but I couldn't find an english translation. If someone can find such, please, share.
- ColinWright 6y agoPersonal speculation: There's nothing about this that someone in Babbage's time could not have build. Removing the negatives from that statement ... this could easily have been built in Babbage's time. However, it would not have been. A literal Turing machine needs a huge tape and a very, very long time to be able to do useful calculations. Babbage's Difference Engine could be seen to be immediately useful performing a task that was essential at the time. Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine was less obviously immediately useful, but it could do things that were obviously on the way to be useful, so might have got some speculative funding. But a naked, vanilla Turing Machine is so obviously not (directly) useful, and no one of the time would having funding building one that was big enough to do anything of practical interest.
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- Joker_vD 6y agoWell, one could invent some mean VM to run upon a universal TM, and program it instead. With some hardware codec to translate inputs/outputs between this VM and the UTM... but yeah, if you want to do arithmetics, start with Odhner pinwheels.
- hermitcrab 6y agoIndeed. The 'Turing machine' was proposed by Turing as a thought experiment. It was the simplest implentation of a universal computing machine that he could think of. Any physical implementation of it would be incredibly inefficient.
- tgv 6y agoA Turing Machine can be a very simple device: it depends on the size of the transition function. The model in the video has a small one. Implementing the Analytical Engine would make it pretty big.
- squibbles 6y agoSuppose someone two thousand years ago saw the plans for the Turing machine in the video. How might that have shaped history? Whether it was practical or not is not really the question, but rather how might it shape future technologies? Makes me think of da Vinci's notebook.