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Register Machine Model of Computation: Difference between revisions
Register Machine Model of Computation (view source)
Revision as of 00:39, 7 January 2016
, 8 years ago→Computational Models and the History of Computing
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The next significant model to arise was the ''lambda calculus'', created by Alonzo Church in 1936. This was a simpler model of functions than the existing type of recursive function theory, but was demonstrated to have the same computational power as RFT. That same year, Alan Turing developed yet another model, the ''Turing Machine'', which he used to demonstrate that a well-known unsolved goal in mathematics - whether there existed a method for proving that any arbitrary computation process would go to completion - was impossible, by showing that the process itself would necessarily be undecidable in the general case. In doing so, he showed that it was possible to design a variant of the Turing Machine that could simulate any other possible Turing machine; he postulated that this ''Universal Turing Machine'' could perform any decidably mechanizable computation.
These models were 'mechanical' only in the sense of being built on a set of rules; they were not very useful for developing a physical computing device. Of them all, the UTM was the closest, as it was described in terms of an imaginary mechanism consisting of a reading and writing head and an infinitely long paper tape. Which it was not a practical design, it demonstrated that the mechanical calculators of the time had a solid theoretical basis, and more importantly, re-introduced the concept (originally proposed by Charles Babbage) of a ''programmable'' computation device. Turing would go on to do significant work in the development of one of the first such
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