The current sequence of Tech Tuesday posts is about the theory of computation. We have already seen that a simple of model of computation such as the Finite State Machine is very useful but has severe limitations in that it cannot even decide a language as simple as all palindromes. We then learned about the Turing Machine as the most powerful known model of computation and saw how a Universal Turing Machine establishes the separation of software from hardware. This leads to a natural questio...

This is the first post in the Tech Tuesday cycle on programming. Let’s begin with a simple observation: even though various human languages are quite different from each other they cover much of the same territory – the human experience. We have words for food and activities and threats and so on. There are different words in different languages and sometimes even the symbol set is entirely different (I am struggling to remember Mandarin for our upcoming China trip). But despite those differe...

The current sequence of Tech Tuesday posts is about the theory of computation. We have already seen that a simple of model of computation such as the Finite State Machine is very useful but has severe limitations in that it cannot even decide a language as simple as all palindromes. We then learned about the Turing Machine as the most powerful known model of computation and saw how a Universal Turing Machine establishes the separation of software from hardware. This leads to a natural questio...

This is the first post in the Tech Tuesday cycle on programming. Let’s begin with a simple observation: even though various human languages are quite different from each other they cover much of the same territory – the human experience. We have words for food and activities and threats and so on. There are different words in different languages and sometimes even the symbol set is entirely different (I am struggling to remember Mandarin for our upcoming China trip). But despite those differe...