Talk:Turing machine equivalents

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Philosophy, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of content related to philosophy on Wikipedia. If you would like to support the project, please visit the project page, where you can get more details on how you can help, and where you can join the general discussion about philosophy content on Wikipedia.PhilosophyWikipedia:WikiProject PhilosophyTemplate:WikiProject PhilosophyPhilosophy articles

Low

This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Associated task forces:
/
	Logic

Wang machines

I've revised the section on Wang machines to more-accurately reflect the content of Wang's 1957 paper. Specifically, the paper introduced a variety of machines other than the B-machine (e.g., the W-machine). Also, Wang explicitly stated that his principal purpose was to present a self-contained theory of computation that was, in its basic operations, more economical than Turing's theory -- practical computation per se was not the main consideration (as evidenced by the minimal instruction-sets and tape-alphabet), contrary to what some of the article's later comments seem to suggest. (He wrote that it was his intention to present the theory "in a language which is familiar to those who are engaged in the use and construction of large-scale computers", thus encouraging a "rapproachement" between the practical and the theoretical developments. I believe the word "language" here simply refers to his expository diction, not to what we now call a "computer language".) Lastly, I'm not familiar with what the article calls "Lee's W-machine", but it looks suspiciously like an erroneous reference to Wang's W-machine. --r.e.s. 05:24, 14 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'll have to research. There really is a Lee's W-machine, but I can't rememeber off the top of my head where this comes from. (All these articles have needed another set of editorial eyes ... ). Bill Wvbailey 16:05, 14 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Multi-track/Multi-tape Turing machines

This article has a summary section and a main article link on Multitape Turing machines. We also have an article (listed in the template but not summarized here) on Multi-track Turing machines.
I’ve no idea what the difference is, or even if there is one. Can someone who knows about these things have a look and comment?
If they are the same, maybe the Multi-track TM and Multi-tape TM pages should be merged; if they're different, Multi-track TM should have a summary and main article link on this page. The template would need fixing in either case.
Any thoughts? Moonraker12 (talk) 12:20, 15 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]