Timeline for Why have additional symbols on a Turing machine?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 2, 2014 at 18:09 | vote | accept | joker | ||
| Jan 23, 2014 at 20:43 | answer | added | Yuval Filmus | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jan 23, 2014 at 19:54 | answer | added | Denis | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jan 23, 2014 at 19:12 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackCompSci/status/426432385027416065 | ||
| Jan 23, 2014 at 19:11 | comment | added | Patrick87 |
By the way, for most interpretations of I understand that these need to be omitted to get a computable number I can imagine, your understanding is wrong.
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| Jan 23, 2014 at 19:09 | comment | added | Patrick87 | Why even give a TM as an example? It seems sufficient to point out that the "point" of having more than two letters in the English alphabet is more or less the same as the "point" of allowing more than two letters in a TM's tape alphabet. The answer could range from "it's convenient" to "that's just how it ended up", with everything in between being equally as valid. Really, the question should be why computer hardware relies on binary representations, not vice versa. Another interesting question might discuss unary alphabets. The answer to this question, as asked, is "because!" | |
| Jan 23, 2014 at 19:06 | comment | added | Raphael | @G.Bach I thought of nothing more than separating, say, numbers of a list. If you can use only binary symbols, you immediately need two bits per bit in order encode separators uniquely, rendering everything far more complex. Anybody who has done any proof on TMs has seen "mark that symbol" or something like that, which causes similar problems. (I just did not want to steal "your" answer.) | |
| Jan 23, 2014 at 18:30 | comment | added | G. Bach | @Raphael I figured that, but couldn't come up with an example. It's been a while since I thought about this stuff in detail. | |
| Jan 23, 2014 at 18:10 | comment | added | Raphael | @G.Bach Together with an example, this would make a fine answer, I think. | |
| Jan 23, 2014 at 18:10 | history | edited | Raphael | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
deleted 22 characters in body; edited title
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| Jan 23, 2014 at 17:21 | comment | added | G. Bach | Because TMs are a formalism to think about computation, and sometimes having more symbols than $0$ and $1$ makes thinking about problems easier. They are not a blueprint for hardware. | |
| Jan 23, 2014 at 17:17 | comment | added | Karolis Juodelė | You mean, why a TM could have an alphabet other than $\{0, 1\}$. | |
| Jan 23, 2014 at 16:19 | history | asked | joker | CC BY-SA 3.0 |