Houjun Liu

Church-Turing thesis

Anything that can be computed by a reasonable model of computation can also be computed by a turing machine.

“Everyone’s intuitive notion of algorithms is a Turing-machine”

Note that this is not a theorem: its just a scientific hypothesis because we have no formalization of the “intuitive notion”.

multi-tape machines

Consider:

would this give us something stronger? as in, we modify our transition function as simultaneously operating on all tapes

\begin{equation} \delta : Q \times \Gamma^{k} \times \qty{L, R}^{k} \end{equation}

theorem: every multi-tape TM is actually a single-tape TM.

  • lay your three inputs into your tape, separated by a sharp
  • duplicate your symbol set, each of which to include something which would mark “our head is here”
  • we simply now just run one move on each tape, and moving all the way to the left