Topic summary

Total Turing machine

Total Turing machine

Extracted from the Wikipedia article Decider (Turing machine).

Functions computable by total Turing machines

In practice, many functions of interest are computable by machines that always halt. A machine that uses only finite memory on any particular input can be forced to halt for every input by restricting its flow control capabilities so that no input will ever cause the machine to enter an infinite loop. As a trivial example, a machine implementing a finitary decision tree will always halt.