Programmers normally want to minimize the time their code takes to execute. But in 1962, the Hungarian mathematician Tibor Radó posed the opposite problem. He asked: How long can a simple computer ...

Turing machines were first proposed by British mathematician Alan Turing in 1936, and are a theoretical mathematical model of what it means for a system to "be a computer." At a high level, these ...

This week we’ll venture in the realm of theory for a change, starting with Turing machines. In case some of you don’t know what a Turing machine is, here is the Wikipedia definition: “A theoretical ...

Quanta Magazine Articles on Turing machines In math and computer science, researchers have long understood that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how even ...

Turing machines are widely believed to be universal, in the sense that any computation done by any system can also be done by a Turing machine. In a new article, researchers present their work ...