Shift overflow counter

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Shift overflow counter is an informal class of Turing machines. A typical Turing machine in this class has the following behavior:

  • it represents digits as short fixed-length blocks of symbols
  • it spends most of its time implementing basic double counter until one of the sides overflows (expands) which leads to changing the offsets of blocks, making them non-valid representations of digits
  • after “Counter Phase” there is a “Reset Phase” where the contents are “reparsed”, creating a new double counter configuration. The new configuration could lead to halting.

Note: some examples (like the halting shift-overflow counters below) use a counter on one side and a bouncer (sometimes called unary counter) on the other.

Examples

Halting shift-overflow counters:

Related links