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As such it is still widely used in theoretical computer science, especially in complexity theory and the theory of computation. The thesis that states that Turing machines indeed capture the informal notion of effective or mechanical method in logic and mathematics is known as the Church-Turing thesis.
The concept of the Turing machine is based on the idea of a person executing a well-defined procedure by changing the contents of an infinite amount of ordered paper sheets that can contain one of a finite set of symbols. The person needs to remember one of a finite set of states and the procedure is formulated in very basic steps in the form of "If your state is 42 and the symbol you see is a '0' then replace this with a '1', remember the state 17, and go to the following sheet."
Turing machines shouldn't be confused with the Turing test, Turing's attempt to capture the notion of artificial intelligence.
A Turing machine that is able to simulate any other Turing machine is called a universal Turing machine or simply a universal machine as Turing described it in 1947:
A Turing machine is a pushdown automaton made more powerful by relaxing the last-in-first-out requirement of its stack. (Interestingly, a seemingly minor relaxation enables the Turing machine to perform such a wide variety of computations that it can serve as a model for the computational capabilities of all modern computer software.)
More precisely, a Turing machine consists of:
Note that every part of the machine is finite, but it is the potentially unlimited amount of tape that gives it an unbounded amount of storage space.
More formally, a (one-tape) Turing machine is a 7-tuple , where
A k-tape Turing machine is a 7-tuple , where
The following Turing machine has an alphabet {'0', '1'}, with 0 being the blank symbol. It expects a series of 1's on the tape, with the head initially on the leftmost 1, and doubles the 1's with a 0 in between, i.e., "111" becomes "1110111". The set of states is {s1, s2, s3, s4, s5} and the start state is s1. The action table is as follows.
Old Read Wr. New Old Read Wr. New St. Sym. Sym. Mv. St. St. Sym. Sym. Mv. St. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - s1 1 -> 0 R s2 s4 1 -> 1 L s4 s2 1 -> 1 R s2 s4 0 -> 0 L s5 s2 0 -> 0 R s3 s5 1 -> 1 L s5 s3 0 -> 1 L s4 s5 0 -> 1 R s1 s3 1 -> 1 R s3A computation of this Turing machine might for example be: (the position of the head is indicated by displaying the cell in bold face)
Step State Tape Step State Tape - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1 s1 11 9 s2 1001 2 s2 01 10 s3 1001 3 s2 010 11 s3 10010 4 s3 0100 12 s4 10011 5 s4 0101 13 s4 10011 6 s5 0101 14 s5 10011 7 s5 0101 15 s1 11011 8 s1 1101 -- halt --The behavior of this machine can be described as a loop: it starts out in s1, replaces the first 1 with a 0, then uses s2 to move to the right, skipping over 1's and the first 0 encountered. S3 then skips over the next sequence of 1's (initially there are none) and replaces the first 0 it finds with a 1. S4 moves back to the left, skipping over 1's until it finds a 0 and switches to s5. s5 then moves to the left, skipping over 1's until it finds the 0 that was originally written by s1. It replaces that 0 with a 1, moves one position to the right and enters s1 again for another round of the loop. This continues until s1 finds a 0 (this is the 0 right in the middle between the two strings of 1's) at which time the machine halts.
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