September 2022
Intermediate to advanced
496 pages
12h 32m
English

Spend enough time around programming languages, and two phrases inevitably appear: “Turing machine” and “Turing completeness.” In this chapter, we’ll explain what these phrases mean and why they are important. Specifically, we’ll introduce the halting problem and discuss Alan Turing’s fantastic solution to it. That will set the stage for discussing Turing machines and Turing completeness. We’ll end by simulating a Turing machine in Python.
The topics of this chapter fall under the heading “theoretical computer science,” which is a branch of mathematics, not software engineering. As we’ll see below, theoretical ...
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