Wolfram 2,3 Turing Machine Research Prize

Stephen Wolfram [photo credit: Tom Feldcamp]

Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica, is to award a $25,000 prize to the first person or group to prove (or disprove) that a particular very simple Turing machine, a very simple theoretical computer stipulated by Stephen Wolfram, can act as a universal computer – in other words, emulate any other possible computer.

This is a 70-year-old puzzle at the very core of modern computing. The problem was originally laid down in 1936 by British mathematician Alan Turing, and paved the way for the computer revolution. He created the Turing machine – an abstract model of a computer – and showed that a 'universal Turing machine' could in effect perform any computation.

Since then, there has been many efforts to find the simplest universal Turing machine. By the early 1960s, American artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky had shown that a particular machine with 28 possible operations (7 states and 4 colors) could be universal.

The prize was announced on the 5th anniversary of Stephen Wolfram’s book 'A New Kind of Science', which showed how programs and systems with extremely simple rules can be capable of highly complex behavior--and of sophisticated computation. In that book, Stephen proved a machine with just 2 states and 5 colors is universal, substantially improving on Minsky's previous result. But Wolfram wants the prizewinner to go one better and prove that a machine with only 2 states and 3 colors is a universal Turing machine, making it the simplest possible.

The prize is open to anyone, has no closing date, and will be judged by a committee with nine members, including Stephen Wolfram. For more details, visit Wolfram 2,3 Turing Machine Research Prize.