Re: Another clueless wikipedia article

Simon G Best wrote:
> Certainly it strangely refers to having "previously stated that a
> desktop PC, along with all real computers, are finite state machines",
> even though they don't seem to have made such a statement earlier on in
> the article. However, the statement that "a desktop PC, along with all
> real computers, are finite state machines" is correct, and does not mean
> that they are assuming "that desktop computers cannot be turing
> machines." But their statement does imply that there are some Turing
> Machines that a PC isn't, and can never be programmed to be, which is
> correct.

Yes, that's what I would agree with in the discussion with Ben, but I
have a problem with this. What sense does it make to interject this
discussion in an article about computability theory? Isn't the author
supposed to talk about partially recursive functions and what it means
for a number to be computable, what it means to be a function to be
computable, etc.? I think this article isn't the right place for
analyzing the differences and similarities between desktop PCs and
FSMs. I would appreciate a separate article dealing with this problem,
but I am afraid it would be hard to do favor to this subject, which is
somewhat interesting philosophically, but has little use for a computer
scientist (I think).

And sorry for getting angry in the original post. An argument that
"personal computers are not Turing Machines, they are only finite state
machines" was often brought up in this newsgroup, and I thought it was
an extension of that discussion. At any rate, there are also Finite
State Machines that a PC isn't, but that is not a very interesting
fact. I stated how I think that should be put in my response: A
desktop PC that is not extensible can be seen as either a FSM or a TM.
It is interesting to note that such a machine cannot implement a
universal Turing machine which could simulate any possible Turing
Machine

The problem with the current state of the article is, it at least
implies to the reader that you can't study desktop PCs by way of Turing
Machines, which is just plain wrong. That's why I think it is
misleading. Such suggestions seem to detriment from the importance of
the definition of a Turing Machine. The definition lies at the heart of
time/space complexity analysis which lets us analyze real algorithms
that run on real desktop PCs. This is more than just being "useful", I
think it is necessary to treat the PCs as TMs to make this work!
Second, the assertion that "all real computers are FSMs" seems
philosophically unsatisfactory. Is a growable cellular automata a
finite state machine? I think it's much better to treat it as a
full-fledged computer. You cannot expect the reader to infer all the
discussion that we are making by himself, and that first sentence about
desktop PCs seems irrelevant and confusing. The author would IMO have
to stress that by desktop PC he means a device that cannot be extended
in any way, has a fixed RAM chip, and no connection to the outside
world, etc. Why does not the author talk about the soda vending
machine which would be much much more appropriate as a positive
example?

But I think, eventually, there is no reason wikipedia should not be a
great reference for all basic computer science :)

Perhaps I'm just nitpicking. It may be sufficient just to change that
first sentence so it gets the reference right, and perhaps remove the
bit about "all real computers", I really think that bit is problematic.
Because it does imply that all real computers are FSMs and not TMs. Ben
also seems to have understood it like that and not in the correct sense
that you understood, so I think it is clear that the explanation there
leads to ambiguity!

Best Regards,

--
Eray

.

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