quines and turing machines

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

Dear Thomas,
> From: "thomas m farrelly" <thomasmfarrelly@hotmail.com>

> And I have a question. What does a quine written on a turing machine look
> like? Does anyone have examples? Is it possible to create one that starts
> with an empty tape?
Depends on what exactly you call a Turing Machine.
There are so many variants. Do you mean to write a program for
the particular universal machine described in Turing's 1936 paper
"On Computable Numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem"?
You can find some stuff on the web:
	http://dmoz.org/Science/Math/Logic_and_Foundations/Logicians/Turing,_Alan_Mathison/
The following URL ought to contain the article, but is MIA
	http://www.abelard.org/turpap2/turpap2.htm
(if someone finds out about it, please tell review@tunes.org about it).

Personally, I find it combinatory logic nicer when studying fine theoretical
properties of computations. See, e.g. John Tromp's
"Kolmogorov Complexity in Combinatory Logic":
	http://www.cwi.nl/~tromp/cl/CL/

> About quines: [...] I know there is a list of examples somewhere on the
> internet, but I cant fint it now.
Search for "Quine" on the page:
	http://tunes.org/Review/Reflection.html

If you find more good stuff, please edit the files by CVS...

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
Never try not to think, it won't work.
	-- Tril