Archive for the 'formalism' Category

Turing Machines and 7-Tuples

Topic: formalism, math, turing machine, CS| No Comments »

Edit: Now updated with link to picture

This has been bothering me since yesterday, and were it not for people in the CS department e-mailing me stuff, it would still bother me. Nothing very deep about this, but it's an interesting difference in notation.

Yesterday afternoon, EAS, my cubemate, was looking at a Facebook photograph of someone who had the 7-tuple formal representation for a Turing machine tattooed on their body. That's OK, people tend to have interesting tattoos. What threw me off about this picture however was the fact that the tuple looked different from what my memory was serving up, and this is bad since one does hope that nearly a semester's worth of sitting in on classes, and a semester's worth of TAing a course would at least leave me with a not so wrong memory of what these tuples are, even though admittedly they don't show up all that often on assignments or such.

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