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The breakthrough I am talking about came with the proof of a Universal Turing machine with 2 states and 3 symbols, created through a prize-incentive announced by Wolfram Research in May 2007.

Wolfram, which spearheaded the development of a software named Mathematica and who's founder is the author of a book entitled A new kind of science that tinkered with the idea of this 2,3 Turing Machine, offered a $25,000 incentive to whomever could develop a Universal proof around this model.

As it turns out, 5 months after the initial announcement, a proof for the simplest universal turing machine was announced. Among the most important pieces in the announcement you will find:

From our everyday experience with computers, this seems pretty surprising[The 2,3 T.Machine]. After all, we're used to computers whose CPUs have been carefully engineered, with millions of gates.It seems bizarre that we should be able to achieve universal computation with a machine as simple as the one above--that we can find just by doing a little searching in the space of possible machines. It's just that in our normal efforts of engineering, we've been too constrained to see with such things.

Though its quick to point out: it's possible to make a "compiler" that compiles "code" for some known class of universal machines to code for the 2,3 machine. But his "compiler" doesn't make terribly compact or efficient code. In fact, for anything but the simplest cases, the code tends to be astronomically large and horrendously inefficient.

Going onto say: No doubt it'll be possible to find much better compilers, that make much better code. And that'll be interesting. Perhaps one day there'll even be practical molecular computers built from this very 2,3 Turing machine. With tapes a bit like RNA strands, and heads moving up and down like ribosomes. When we think of nanoscale computers, we usually imagine carefully engineering them to mimic the architecture of the computers we know today.

And on a no lesser note is the person who developed the proof: a 20 year-old undergraduate from Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Given the nature and incentive of the problem, I would have thought a tenured academic could have been a more apt candidate to provide a quicker solution, but alas, I guess breakthrough's in all areas including those of academic computer science subjects are going to the younger generations.