Comments on: Human heart is a Turing machine, research on XBox 360 shows. Wait, what?

By: EdorFaus

EdorFaus — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:24:12 +0000

Jeo: My guess is, it’s calculating the number of heartbeats that occur during your lifetime, and will halt when that calculation is done. This is only a guess though. ;p

By: Jeo

Jeo — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:43:46 +0000

This leaves me with two questions: what is my heart calculating, and when will it halt?

By: Gallery of Processor Cache Effects

Gallery of Processor Cache Effects — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:36:01 +0000

[...] Human heart is a Turing machine, research on XBox 360 shows. Wait, what? [...]

By: nicola

nicola — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:28:53 +0000

@Eric

Ariel is right,

Game-of-Life is in finite space.

In finite space everything is decidable
by another machine with more space.

By: johaneriksson.se » Blog Archive » Around The Web

johaneriksson.se » Blog Archive » Around The Web — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:43:11 +0000

[...] but I imagine it could allow for interesting medical applications. You can read a blog about it here, and get the scientific paper [...]

By: ZagNut

ZagNut — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:21:03 +0000

Again, another brilliant article…

By: Dustin

Dustin — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 16:03:12 +0000

I want a C to heart compiler!

By: Brett

Brett — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 13:45:17 +0000

Does the heart function in a TC way? I say, no. It’s a pump and does not require the remembering of anything from “state” to “state” during operation. If it is shown that the heart cells can function as random access memory and the heart’s function might adjust accordingly, then you might have a case – but it really depends on how it responds.

The question one must ask is, does said machine remember and act on this information of the past? One part of our body, other than our brain, that “remembers” is our immune system. I would contend that our brain is not the only TC, or at least “memory sensitive,” mechanism in the body – but I am pretty sure the heart is not one any more than our kidneys are.

Cheers

By: Igor Ostrovsky

Igor Ostrovsky — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 03:55:58 +0000

Ivan & Abednego:

1. The tissue is uniform according to this model. It is only the signals – chemical concentrations – that change (at least as far as I understand the model). So, to construct a particular Turing machine, you only have to change the initial concentrations, but you don’t have to rearrange any tissue.

2. When the number of states is on the order of 2^large_number, you can treat it as infinite for most purposes. Nothing physical can really be Turing-complete, since the number of particles is finite (at least according to the physics known so far).

By: Abednego

Abednego — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 03:44:43 +0000

I think Confused and Ivan are both onto something. Just because it is possible to construct a universal Turing machine out of heart tissue doesn’t mean that anyone’s heart tissue actually has this configuration. Just because it’s theoretically impossible to predict the limiting behaviour of hearts in general doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to predict the limiting behaviour of all the existing human hearts.

Also, the heart is finite in size, and you are thinking of it as a collection of digital logic gates, which means that the amount of information that it can store is bounded by a constant. This makes it a deterministic finite automaton, and those are not Turing-complete by a long shot.