Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: The 2.0 throwdown thread
by
gjhiggins
on 22/08/2015, 17:30:05 UTC
if you would actually read http://ciyam.org/at. I don't know who is saying the at's aren't turing complete....whoever is saying that needs to go and rtfm

Unfortunately, the only description that either DDG (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Turing+site%3Aciyam.org) or I can find in the CIYAM docs is gibberish:

http://ciyam.org/at/at.html Automated Transactions Specification
Quote
In brief an Automated Transaction is a "Turing complete" set of byte code instructions which will be executed by a byte code interpreter built into its host.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness Turing completeness

Quote
In colloquial usage, the terms "Turing complete" or "Turing equivalent" are used to mean that any real-world general-purpose computer or computer language can approximately simulate the computational aspects of any other real-world general-purpose computer or computer language.

Quote
Most programming languages, conventional and unconventional, are Turing-complete. This includes:
All general-purpose languages in wide use.
...
Turing completeness is an abstract statement of ability, rather than a prescription of specific language features used to implement that ability. The features used to achieve Turing completeness can be quite different; Fortran systems would use loop constructs or possibly even goto statements to achieve repetition; Haskell and Prolog, lacking looping almost entirely, would use recursion.

CIYAM's "specification" document is wrong as well as imprecise, ATs in themselves are not Turing complete and scarequotes won't make it so. The document, if it aspires to meet the requirements of a specification, should contain the precise details of the features ensuring Turing completeness of the programming language in which the ATs are expressed.

I can understand why people might want to distinguish sharply between ATs and a Turing complete scripting language.


Cheers

Graham