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Darren New schrieb:
>> As mentioned before, in that sense there is /only/ programming through
>> re-wiring, and therefore in that sense it doesn't make sense to even
>> /mention/ such a property for any computing device.
>
> But the whole magic of the property is that you *can* build such an
> interpreter. Before the UTM was invented, it wasn't anyways clear to
> anyone that such a thing was possible. Nobody knew that the rules of
> arithmetic were adequate to express the rules of arithmetic.
True. Yet in 2009, people are taking it for granted by now, so if a
contemporary Wikipedia article claims that Colossus could be
re-programmed "partially (by re-wiring)", then I find it difficult to
imagine that this is to be interpreted anything other than as "partially
(by re-wiring /only/, providing no other option)".
/That/ was the initial starting point of the discussion we're now having.
So in this sense, say: Can a computing machine that is programmable /by
re-wiring only/ ever be Turing complete?
I categorically say no, as there is obviously no way to feed such a
machine with data isomorphic to some generic initial tape content for a
UTM, and have it generate output data isomorphic to what the UTM would
produce.
Unless, of course, you'd consider human "re-wiring operators" as being
part of the machine, and their orders as being part of the input data,
but I guess we agree that this is not normally the scope of how we'd
define a computing device.
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