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Given that you can emulate a turing machine in your mind, I'd assume that it is more than a Turing machine.
by malka 13y ago
Given that you can emulate a turing machine in your mind, I'd assume that it is more than a Turing machine.
- bencollier49 13y agoBut no infinite tape. I can't remember if that's essential to the definition of a Turing machine?
- Sharlin 13y agoObviously no physical machine can have an actual unbounded tape (note that unbounded is not the same as infinite!) The interesting question is whether the brain is Turing-equivalent if given a notebook with an unlimited number of pages to keep track of the program state.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoAny Universal Turing Machine can emulate any other Turing machine. That's not interesting. What would be interesting would be if human minds could solve the Halting Problem.
- danieltillett 13y agoThis would prove that humans are not Turing machines - so far no human has solved this.
- danieltillett 13y agoI don't think this is actually known.
- Dewie 13y agoSo then it has the power of (at least) a universal turing machine.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Sharlin 13y agoIt is not proven that a human mind can emulate all Turing machines (given an arbitrary amount of external storage). All physical computers are "just" finite state machines (because they don't have unbounded storage); you can emulate a subset of Turing machines using an FSM just fine even though a TM is strictly more powerful than an FSM.