Computer Science Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, researchers and practitioners of computer science. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am trying to interpret the following problem:
"Describe an algorithm for a Turing machine which receives the integer n as input and proceeds to write the description of the n-th Turing machine from the standard enumeration on its tape."
I am confused about how a Turing machine itself can represent another Turing machine (the n-th Turing machine).
The question is probably assuming that there is some arbitrary but agreed-upon convention that specifies how to write a Turing machine description with the symbols of some alphabet. Since all Turing machines have by definition a finite description, all valid outputs will be finite strings.
The exercise itself is an ordinary combinatorics problem.
