Universal Turing machine
Type of Turing machine / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In computer science, a universal Turing machine (UTM) is a Turing machine capable of computing any computable sequence,[1] as described by Alan Turing in his seminal paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem". Common sense might say that a universal machine is impossible, but Turing proves that it is possible.[lower-alpha 1] He suggested that we may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions q 1: q 2 . .... qI; which will be called "m-configurations".[2] He then described the operation of such machine, as described below, and argued:
It is my contention that these operations include all those which are used in the computation of a number.[3]
Alan Turing introduced the idea of such a machine in 1936–1937. This principle is considered to be the origin of the idea of a stored-program computer used by John von Neumann in 1946 for the "Electronic Computing Instrument" that now bears von Neumann's name: the von Neumann architecture.[4]