Showing papers by "Peter Wegner published in 1998"
TL;DR: It is shown that interaction machines cannot be described by sound and complete first-order logics, and that incompleteness is inherently necessary to realize greater expressiveness, and the robustness of interactive models in expressing open systems, programming in the large, graphical user interfaces, and agent-oriented artificial intelligence is compared to the robustity of Turing machines.
223 citations
01 Jul 1998
TL;DR: It is shown that SIMs and PTMs are expressively equivalent but more expressive than TMs where, following Milner, {\em expressiveness} is defined in terms of observerability of system behavior.
Abstract: D. Goldin, Univ. of Massachusetts - Boston P. Wegner, Brown University This paper establishes a relation between {\em interaction} and {\em persistence}. Interactive computation is characterized by Interaction Machines (IMs), with a restricted subclass of {\em Sequential Interaction Machines} (SIMs) controlled by a single sequential stream of interactions, modeling transducers and simple data abstractions. {\em Persistent Turing Machines} (PTMs) are introduced by extending Turing Machines (TMs) with a persistent working tape. It is shown that SIMs and PTMs are expressively equivalent but more expressive than TMs where, following Milner, {\em expressiveness} is defined in terms of observerability of system behavior. This work is part of a larger effort towards a more comprehensive formalization of interactive computation, with the aim of characterizing empirical computation by interaction.
12 citations