Talk:Turing machine equivalents

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[edit] Wang machines

I've revised the section on Wang machines to more-accurately reflect the content of Wang's 1957 paper. Specifically, the paper introduced a variety of machines other than the B-machine (e.g., the W-machine). Also, Wang explicitly stated that his principal purpose was to present a self-contained theory of computation that was, in its basic operations, more economical than Turing's theory -- practical computation per se was not the main consideration (as evidenced by the minimal instruction-sets and tape-alphabet), contrary to what some of the article's later comments seem to suggest. (He wrote that it was his intention to present the theory "in a language which is familiar to those who are engaged in the use and construction of large-scale computers", thus encouraging a "rapproachement" between the practical and the theoretical developments. I believe the word "language" here simply refers to his expository diction, not to what we now call a "computer language".) Lastly, I'm not familiar with what the article calls "Lee's W-machine", but it looks suspiciously like an erroneous reference to Wang's W-machine. --r.e.s. 05:24, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

I'll have to research. There really is a Lee's W-machine, but I can't rememeber off the top of my head where this comes from. (All these articles have needed another set of editorial eyes ... ). Bill Wvbailey 16:05, 14 October 2007 (UTC)