Round 10: Tossup 20

In 2007, Alex Smith won a 25,000-dollar prize for showing that a system denoted (2, 3) has a “weak” form of this property. Alan Perlis coined a term referring to systems with this property that are nonetheless not very useful as “tarpits.” In 2004, Matthew Cook demonstrated that Rule 110 has this property, (10[1])thus showing elementary cellular automata can have it. In 2019, (10[2])Alex Churchill showed that the game Magic: the Gathering has this property. (10[1])Tom Wildenhain once jokingly demonstrated that Microsoft PowerPoint does in fact have this property. Given infinite memory, most programming languages, like Python and Java, have this property. A system that can compute any computable function has, for 10 points, what property of systems that are equivalent to a head that reads and writes symbols on an infinite tape? ■END■

ANSWER: Turing-completeness [or computational universality; accept weak-universality; accept answers specifying that it is a Turing machine or that it can simulate a Turing machine; reject “computable” or “computability”]
<GC, Other Science> | Packet N - Simon Fraser A, Carleton A, Georgia Tech A, Claremont A, Warwick A, Columbia B
= Average correct buzzpoint

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Buzzes


Summary

TournamentEditionMatchHeardConv. %Neg %Avg. Buzz
California (South)Main Site4100%0%62.50
CanadaMain Site1182%18%70.56
Great LakesMain Site5100%20%80.60
NortheastMain Site560%40%92.33
UKMain Site6100%17%82.67
Upper Mid-AtlanticMain Site888%13%70.71