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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • The point of these lectures is mostly not to teach how to work with Turing machines, it is to understand the theoretical limits of computers. The Turing machine is just a simple to describe and well-studied tool used to explore that.

    For example, are there things there that cannot be computed on a computer, no matter for how long it computes? What about if the computer is able to make guesses along the way, can it compute more? Because of this comic, no — it would only be a lot faster.

    Arguably, many programmers can do their job even without knowing any of that. But it certainly helps with seeing the big picture.