CHAPTER 13

OTHER MODELS OF COMPUTATION

CHAPTER SUMMARY

Grammars are examples of the concept of a rewriting system: a set of rules by which a string can be successively rewritten to produce other strings and thereby define languages. This chapter briefly outlines some typical rewriting systems and explores their connection with Turing machines.

Although Turing machines are the most general models of computation we can construct, they are not the only ones. At various times, other models have been proposed, some of which at first glance seemed to be radically different from Turing machines. Eventually, however, all the models were found to be equivalent. Much of the pioneering work in this area was done in the period between 1930 and 1940 and ...

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