What Does Turing Complete Mean?
A system is said to be “Turing complete” in computer theory if it can be used to emulate a Turing machine, which is a theoretical construct designed by mid-century mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing.
Techopedia Explains Turing Complete
The Turing machine itself is composed of three theoretical components — a limited set of states, an infinite amount of storage, and a transition function. With these attributes, the Turing machine represents certain boundaries of traditional computation.
With this in mind, many modern programming languages and some codebases are said to be Turing complete because they can accomplish the same computing principles noted in Turing’s theory. However, a technicality applies — because none of these systems have an infinite amount of storage, none of them can really be said to be Turing complete in total.
However it’s measured, the idea of Turing completeness is useful in modern computer theory, but completely separate from the Turing Test, which is Turing’s idea of assessing whether technologies can simulate human intelligence effectively.
