turing machine

It is funny to think how much we take Turing and his work for granted today.
My roommate is an electrical engineer and I’ve tinkered in programming since 1990 (I still miss BASIC). For me, this concept is a given. A computer using a simple binary system for everything. It is either X or O, 0 or 1, open or closed. Logically, almost everything can be described like this- or at least we would like everything to be described like this.
This concept, however, still has a lot of work needed on it. Computers can’t yet write poetry or even translate between languages that well yet. How can we better define the rules to the game? Can we develop a broaded way of operating on those rules? What about X, O and L instead of just X and O?
Calculus killed me so I can’t begin to postulate on something like this, but what’s next?
Computers continue to become faster and able to do more calculations per second, but how and when are we going to transform the way which they do calculations?

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One response to “turing machine

  1. Russell Friesenhahn Avatar
    Russell Friesenhahn

    We’ll be using 0’s and 1’s for as long as computers and the logic under the hood runs off DC power. Power only has two states: on and off. It is easy to detect these states, so that’s why they are used.
    We also have analog technology that can detect multiple values in a range but this hardware is much more complicated.
    As for making computers smarter…well we need some type of free-thinking AI that can come up with it’s own ideas instead of merely recognizing patterns and reacting to them based upon previous data. The problem is we don’t even understand how our own brain works. Until we can understand the brain, I do not see us developing any worthwhile AI.

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