In article <6i88a8$j7g at ux.cs.niu.edu> rickert at cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>andersw+ at pitt.edu (Anders N Weinstein) writes:
>>In article <6i7h70$gij at ux.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <rickert at cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>>>andersw+ at pitt.edu (Anders N Weinstein) writes:
>>>There are things that are being done by the computer on my desk that
>>>I could not map into a Turing machine.
>>>>I'm not talking 'analog'. My concern is with interaction. A Turing
>>>machine is not interactive. A person is, and the computer on my desk
>>>is.
>>>Formal models of computation treat *interaction* in terms of
>>symbols getting written onto the tape memory. This seems a
>>pretty good model of how the operating system code views a device.
>>Right. But you generally have to model this as a Turing machine with
>oracle. You can't model it as a plain Turing machine. The oracle
>places the interactive symbols on the tape in a way that is not
>predictable from within the Turing machine model.
But Turing machines neither need nor are expected to predict their
inputs.
-kitten