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by rmellow 776 days ago
Why do we care if something is Turing complete? In other words, what are applications of Turing completeness?
2 comments

It means that you can basically program it to do anything.

ie you could create a Virtual Machine running inside sed that could run Windows or anything else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness

>In colloquial usage, the terms "Turing-complete" and "Turing-equivalent" are used to mean that any real-world general-purpose computer or computer language can approximately simulate the computational aspects of any other real-world general-purpose computer or computer language.

Interesting sidenote: there's an NSO iPhone exploit that created it's own virtual machine inside an image decoder.

Basically they took a buffer overflow and used it to create a whole turing complete virtual machine.

It's insane. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29568625

With recent proposed regulations requiring real identity/kyc for IaaS, anything Turing complete served online is arguably included :)