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Appreciate you've bowed out of this discussion, but what you're saying makes no sense to me, because then we would just say things are or are not Turing machine

Appreciate you've bowed out of this discussion, but what you're saying makes no sense to me, because then we would just say things are or are not Turing machines. The reason we have the term "Turing complete" and not just "Turing machine" is precisely the fact that nothing can literally be a Turing machine, and we need a useful term in discussions of computability nonetheless. The analysis as to whether or not a system is Turing complete or not is done with respect to the operations it can perform, not its memory capacity, or even the time over which is performs the operations, both of which are always assumed to be "enough" rather than infinite.

asddubs 4y ago
>The reason we have the term "Turing complete" and not just "Turing machine" is precisely the fact that nothing can literally be a Turing machine, and we need a useful term in discussions of computability nonetheless. a turing machine is something way more specific than just "something that can execute algorithms" though, it's a machine that executes them using a specific system and constraints (namely advancing and modifying a strip of tape). So calling anything that can compute what a turing machine can compute a turing machine would be inaccurate just by merit of that. of course ultimately you're right though, words mean what they're used to mean, so turing completeness excludes the infinite memory constraint, my initial comment wasn't really meant fully seriously, just being a smartass for a joke.