ZZZghull at stny.lrun.com (Jerry Hull) writes:
>On 28 Apr 1998 15:52:50 -0500, rickert at cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
>wrote:
>>No, I disagree. In fact this was the sort of thing that the
>>disagreement between Bill Modlin and me was about. We can say that
>>something is a computation without having to map it into the action
>>of a formal Turing machine. From my perspective, the Turing theory
>>is that of an idealized mathematical model of computation. It is not
>>a constraint on any actual computation, that it is required to
>>conform to the idealized model. We generally don't expect our
>>idealized models to exactly correspond to reality. Rather, the
>>expectation is that the model fits well enough to be useful for
>>theoretical analysis.
>I disagree, in turn. It is only insofar as a PC or whatever conforms
>to the Turing model that it can be said to execute algorithms. That
>is what it *means* to be Turing equivalent: the TM defines the
>effective procedure. When your PC departs from the TM spec in this
>respect, it is *broken*.
This is quite wrong. As soon as my PC starts to follow the TM spec,
it is *broken*, for that would mean that the video display system has
broken, the ethernet communication system has broken, and the mouse
system has broken.