Related papers: Wang's B machines are efficiently universal, as is…

We show that 2-tag systems efficiently simulate Turing machines. As a corollary we find that the small universal Turing machines of Rogozhin, Minsky and others simulate Turing machines in polynomial time. This is an exponential improvement…

We survey some work concerned with small universal Turing machines, cellular automata, tag systems, and other simple models of computation. For example it has been an open question for some time as to whether the smallest known universal…

We give small universal Turing machines with state-symbol pairs of (6, 2), (3, 3) and (2, 4). These machines are weakly universal, which means that they have an infinitely repeated word to the left of their input and another to the right.…

Constant bit-size Transformers are known to be Turing complete, but existing constructions require $\Omega(s(n))$ chain-of-thought (CoT) steps per simulated Turing machine (TM) step, leading to impractical reasoning lengths. In this paper,…

This paper goes back to Turing (1936) and treats his machine as a cognitive model (W,D,B), where W is an "external world" represented by memory device (the tape divided into squares), and (D,B) is a simple robot that consists of the…

Wolfram [2, p. 707] and Cook [1, p. 3] claim to prove that a (2,5) Turing machine (2 states, 5 symbols) is universal, via a universal cellular automaton known as Rule 110. The first part of this paper points out a critical gap in their…

We consider computations of a Turing machine subjected to noise. In every step, the action (the new state and the new content of the observed cell, the direction of the head movement) can differ from that prescribed by the transition…

Yao (1993) proved that quantum Turing machines and uniformly generated quantum circuits are polynomially equivalent computational models: $t \geq n$ steps of a quantum Turing machine running on an input of length $n$ can be simulated by a…

Since the definition of the Busy Beaver function by Rado in 1962, an interesting open question has been the smallest value of n for which BB(n) is independent of ZFC set theory. Is this n approximately 10, or closer to 1,000,000, or is it…

This article aims at providing signal machines as small as possible able to perform any computation (in the classical understanding). After presenting signal machines, it is shown how to get universal ones from Turing machines,…

Clift and Murfet (2019) introduced a naive Bayesian smooth relaxation of Turing machines motivated by work in differential linear logic; this was subsequently used to endow spaces of program codes of bounded length with a smooth manifold…

For any fixed $k$, a remarkably simple single-tape Turing machine can simulate $k$ independent counters in real time. Informally, a counter is a storage unit that maintains a single integer (initially 0), incrementing it, decrementing it,…

Using nonstandard analysis, we will extend the classical Turing machines into the internal Turing machines. The internal Turing machines have the capability to work with infinite ($*$-finite) number of bits while keeping the finite…

In this brief note, we give a simple information-theoretic proof that 2-state 3-symbol universal Turing machines cannot possibly exist, unless one loosens the definition of "universal".

We advance a Bayesian concept of 'intrinsic asymptotic universality' taking to its final conclusions previous conceptual and numerical work based upon a concept of a reprogrammability test and an investigation of the complex qualitative…

The busy beaver value BB(n) is the maximum number of steps made by any n-state, 2-symbol deterministic halting Turing machine starting on blank tape. The busy beaver function $n \mapsto \text{BB}(n)$ is uncomputable and, from below, only 4…

It is shown that there is no standard spiking neural P system that simulates Turing machines with less than exponential time and space overheads. The spiking neural P systems considered here have a constant number of neurons that is…

A Turmit is a Turing machine that works over a two-dimensional grid, that is, an agent that moves, reads and writes symbols over the cells of the grid. Its state is an arrow and, depending on the symbol that it reads, it turns to the left…

The Busy Beaver Challenge (or bbchallenge) aims at collaboratively solving the following conjecture: "$S(5) = 47{,}176{,}870$" [Rad\'o, 1962], [Marxen and Buntrock, 1990], [Aaronson, 2020]. This conjecture says that if a 5-state Turing…

The Busy Beaver value $S(n)$ is the maximum number of steps that an $n$-state 2-symbol Turing machine can perform from the all-zero tape before halting. $S$ was historically introduced by Tibor Rad\'o in 1962 as one of the simplest examples…