[FOM] Difference Engine

[A.P. Hazen]

>Panu Raatikainen wrote:
>
>This is probably not the reference you meant, but anyway, the relation
>between Babbage's engine and Turing computability etc. is discussed also
>here: Gandy, Robin (1988) "The confluence of ideas in 1936", in: Rolf Herken
>(ed.) The Universal Turing Machine. A Half-Century Survey, Oxford University
>Press, Verlagen Berlin, 55-111.
>
>----------------------

To which José Felix Costa said

>
>Many thanks.
>However, there is one paper with a full proof of equivalence (a simulation
>of a generic Turing machine, let us say).
>I had the that paper, but it disapeared.

To which I say:
    It's been a few years since I read the Gandy paper Panu  referes 
to, but my recollection is that it does something like that: shows 
that Babbage's machine could perform each of a set of operations 
(computing some  basic functions, minimization-- that sort of thing) 
known to suffice for a  universal computer.  It's also very readable.

Allen Hazen
Philosophy Department
University of Melbourne