New class of T machines...

[Alan Grimes]

om

As much as I try to get beyond turing machines (preferring the lambda
calc), I just had an idea regarding them: 

Not all turing machines are the same. 
You can build a turing machine to do any function, In many cases the
resulting machine can do ONLY that function. But still there is a subset
of those machines that are called *UNIVERSAL* turing machines. These are
such that they behave as interpriters for any language of your choice
using any grammar. This language in turn can be used to evaluate any
function that can be expressed in them, including interpriters for other
languages. 

My idea is that there exists yet another subset of these universal
turing machines that could be called "universal universal turing
machines" that operate as follows: 

To use a universal universal turing machine you first feed it a "primer"
tape that consists of a training tape that will place the machine in one
of an arbitrarily large set of halting states. In other words this tape
will be capable of configuring the UU turing machine in a state such
that it will emulate any given universal turing machine. This is
different than including a program with an interpriter on the same tape.
It literally means that you can take any tape of your choice, encode a
primer tape and then expect the UU machine to match the behavior of any
other turing machine of your choice.

My belief is that such a machine would solve a large portion of the
problem of general intelligence. Work is just beginning on this new
idea, the only thing I can say is that the power of such a machine would
be measured by how many symbols it was capable of learning off the
primer tape... That is UU turing machines aren't completely universal,
only for a certain complexity class of other turing machines...

om

PS: I could use all the help I can get working on this!

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