Google's Turing Machine

[Brightguy]

mirhagk @ Fri Jul 06, 2012 12:23 pm wrote:

traditionally blank is used to denote the symbol that can appear infinitely many times, with a raised bump being the other input value. This gives you binary (0=blank,1=bump) that the turing machine then uses for processing. The most common turing machine implementation uses 32 or 64 0's in a row to denote end of input.

Do you have a reference for that? If you're talking about physical Turing machines that might make sense. But you still can't encode every possible number using the standard notation, since some binary numbers have 32 zeros in a row; you'd have to use some other encoding like ASCII first.

mirhagk @ Fri Jul 06, 2012 12:23 pm wrote:

Binary shows off the real power of a Turing machine, because if one of the inputs is indistinguishable from blank. The fact that the lack of something means something is quite amazing. When your modem receives no information, then it's receiving valuable information. If someone sends you a text file encoded in Unicode 32, you're most likely receiving 3/4 0's, which mean's 3/4's of the information sent to your computer is actually just the fact that nothing was sent.

Well, you can't say that '0' contains no information. But yes, 0 is a profound concept.