3 Sep
1999
3 Sep
'99
3:55 a.m.
Ahhh! It's nice to see someone is awake!
You do need to have some way of delineating the data you are crunching.
Feynman does this in the context of a Turing machine, where he writes
"tape marks" of arbitrary content, but specific significance, to indicate
the state of the process.
Eric Smith wrote:
The ultimate, of course, is the UNARY computer.
If you look in the
"Feynman Lectures on Computation", Richard Feynman, 1996, you'll see
that he has you start designing a unary computer. Maybe not so easy
when all you have to work with is "1"! (It has to have a variable
word length, of course).
When all you have are ones (and nothing else to represent the absence of
a one), what do you use to delimit the start and end of variable-length
words?