Universal Turing machine

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In computer science, a universal Turing machine (UTM) is a Turing machine capable of computing any computable sequence, as described by Alan Turing in his seminal paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem". Or, in other words, a Turing machine that is capable of simulating any other specialized Turing machines. Common sense might say that a universal machine is impossible, but Turing proves that it is possible. He suggested that we may compare a human in the process of computing a real number to a machine that is only capable of a finite number of conditions ⁠ q 1 , q 2 , … , q R {\displaystyle q_{1},q_{2},\dots ,q_{R}} ⁠; which will be called "m-configurations". He then described the operation of such machine...

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