· Here is Alan Turing’s original article from 1936 introducing his computing machine.
· In Chapter 7 we cover the P vs. NP problem. This is one of the Millennium Problems of the Clay Math Institute, and solving it (or any of the other Millennium Problems) will get you a million-dollar prize. Another of the Millennium Problems is the Poincare Conjecture. The New Yorker magazine has an interesting article about a Russian mathematician who appears to have solved the Poincare Conjecture.
· The New York Times (10/31/2006) published an interesting article on the future of computing. It talks a bit about Alan Turing and some of the concepts we cover in class. Several famous computer scientists are quoted in the article.
·
On May 14, 2007, Stephen Wolfram, the developer
of the Mathematica software package, offered a $25,000
prize to anyone who could prove that a small Turing machine that Wolfram
had previously developed is universal.
It was previously known that any smaller Turing machine could not be
universal. On October 24, 2007, Alex
Smith, a 20-year-old undergraduate student in the
· Here is an xkcd comic about the subset-sum problem, which we cover in Chapter 7 (slides 7-73 and 7-74).
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