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Under what definition is a physical computer not Turing Complete? The lack of infinite memory? That requirement would preclude literally everything but theoreti
by colejohnson66 5y ago
Under what definition is a physical computer not Turing Complete? The lack of infinite memory? That requirement would preclude literally everything but theoretical computers. It’s a lot more logical to talk in terms of “if there was infinite tape, would this thing Turing Complete?”
Brainf** is famously Turing Complete and can be executed on any desktop you can think of. That alone is enough to prove that your desktop itself is Turing Complete.
- ggrrhh_ta 5y agoI think that the parent comment is actually supporting your point. It does not need to be Turing Complete to be extremely useful. Conversely, a model of computation (CSS) could be Turing Complete (with infinite memory, etc.) and lack arbitrary access the host filesystem (e.g., it only allows to read specific read-only files), thus being useless.
- carnitine 5y agoTuring completeness is a mathematical concept, why try and extend it to physical devices? Ever computer I can think of corresponds to a finite state machine.
- charcircuit 5y agoEven if you let computers have infinite memory it still doesn't matter that much if a language is Turing complete. The person I replied to seemed to be more worried about CSS reading localstorage compared to being able to recognize a recursively enumerable language.