Re: Can we agree on what a machine is?

Don Mikulecky (mikuleck@HSC.VCU.EDU)
Fri, 29 Jan 1999 17:34:15 -0500


Don Mikulecky replies:

Well I was trying to get him to come right out and say that he was heading
towards
the Universal Turing machine. The answer to you is yes. If You can disretize
the
sets...go from analog to digital...there is no problem... With the Turing
machine we
get into the infinite tape problem...it is NOT realizable!
Don

Norman K. McPhail wrote:

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> Don Mikulecky wrote:
> >
> > Don Mikulecky replies:
> > Help me I'm confused? I am sorry if I left off the word "finite" from the
> > definition. Clearly I am working with Arbib's definition of a finite
Automata.
> > It
> > doesn't work for the case you asked about. That has to be dealt with in
> another
> > way. The issue we seem to be dancing around is realizability, not anything
> like
> > complexity. Maybe I'm missing something?
> > Don
> >
>
> Don:
>
> Excuse this dumb question. But doesn't the introduction of a continuous
> range of possible states simply change this into a fuzzy logic version
> of your machine? From what little I know of these operations, we are
> still dealing with a deterministic behavior pattern. According to the
> fuzzy logic guys I know, whether we exclude the middle of a machine's
> choices or not does not change the fundamentals any more than whether it
> has parallel operations or not.
>
> We can and do even simulate fuzzy logic on our PC's. I have several
> fuzzy logic programs that can do some interesting smart things. So I
> think your parallel processing fuzzy logic definition may still be a
> simple machine.
>
> Norm McPhail
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