On 7/16/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying understanding PCs as universal turing machines is not a common view today?
No. Think of a Turing machine, in the sense of the box running over the tape, moving back and forth writing symbols. What is the Turing machine doing? Usually we think of it as running the program, figuring out the logic, doing what it's told, whatever. But we never think of it as imitating another machine. We don't usually imagine that there's another machine out there that this Turing machine is pretending to be for the moment. ImageMagick is a "program", not a "machine". There is a shift in view from one machine doing useful things, to many machines which do useful things. Every program you write is a whole new machine. I just looked at the Wikipedia encyclopedia imitating an encyclopedia that knows all about Turing machines, and I see that it uses similar terminology: "Turing machines are extremely basic symbol-manipulating devices which - despite their simplicity - can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer that could possibly be constructed." -todd -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
