U

which it operated. Of the early machines, the EDSAC,

Ultrasonic memories played an important role in the
early development of digital computers, but are now
only of historical interest. The report on the EDVAC
drafted by von Neumann in June 1945 on behalf of the
group at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering,
Philadelphia, clearly envisaged this type of memory,
although it did not describe the physical principles on
SEAC, Pilot ACE, EDVAC, and UNIVAC I all had ultra-
sonic memories.
The principle is illustrated in Fig. 1. A train of pulses
representing the number to be stored is modulated
onto a carrier and applied to a piezoelectric crystal in
contact with a column of mercury. The ultrasonic
pulses so generated travel along the column until they
reach another crystal at the f a r end. This converts them
back into electric signals, which are amplified and
rectified. Theresultingpulses are applied to a gate

Modulator tank Mercury Amplifier and

demodulator

CLEAR
waveform
AL waveform
Write
wavefo
Digits in Digits out
Figure 1. Ultrasonic memory.
1812 UNDECIDABLE PROBLEMS
together with pulsesfrom a continuously running clock
pulse generator. This gating operation serves the twin
purposes of regeneration and synchronization. The
emerging pulses, which are exact replicas of the orig-
inal pulses, are reapplied to the modulator and con-
tinue to circulate. The operations of reading, clearing,
and writing can be performed by applying to the gates
shown suitable waveforms accurately synchronized
with the clock. A typical main memory consisted of a
group of 32 tanks, as the columns were called, each
between 0.5 and 1.5 meters long and giving a delay of
between one-third and 1 ms.
In the rnid-l950s, ultrasonic memories using a fine
nickel wire in the form of a coil as the propagation
medium appeared in some low-cost computers. The
waves were excited by making use of the magneto-
strictive properties of the nickel.
Bibliography
1956. Wilkes, M. V. Automatic Digital Computers. New York:
John Wiley.
1985. Wilkes, M. V. Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Maurice V. Wilkes
One of this century’s major intellectual discoveries is
that there aresome perfectly precise problems that can
never be solved. This is a technical result, not a mys-
tical one. There is nothing ineffable about these prob-
lems; indeed, one can give specific examples of them.
Nor should this result be confused with the claim that
some problems (e.g. what is the meaning of life?) are
too imprecise to be solved computationally. Actually,
these unsolvable problems are just as precise as the
problem of computing a sum. Also, the result is not
based on the fact that some problems are just too large
to solve in practical terms. Rather, these problems are
unsolvable even under the assumption that wholly un-
reasonable amounts of time and space are available for
their solution. By way of contrast, it is a trivial matter
under such an assumption to write a program that
plays a perfect game of chess: just explore allof the
possibilitiessystematically. (There are only a finite
number of possibilities, but that number is so astro-
nomically large that this’ exhaustive approach will
never be of practical use.)
In the 1930s, the mathematician Alan Turing intro-
duced a conceptual automaton, now called a Turing
machine, to model the process by which a computer
carries out a computational task. At that time, “com-
puter” meant “one who computes” (Le. a person who
carries out a calculation), but the model applies equally
well to modern electronic computers. Turing then
proved rigorouslythat no Turing machine can solve the
so-called HaltingProblem, the problem of determining
whether Turing machines eventually halt. Some do,
some don’t: the problem is, given a Turing machine
along with its input data, to determine whether or not
it will ever finish its task and halt. Of course, one can
run the Turing machine step by step, and, if it halts,
one would see that it had. The difficulty isthat if it does
not halt then this method will not reveal that fact; no
matter howlong one continues the simulation, it is
conceivable that the machine would have halted if
processing had continued an additional few moments.
Turing’s proofis a formalization of the following
idea. Establish a pairing between all possible Turing
machines (there are infinitely many) and all possible
sets of input data (also infinitely many) in a systematic
way. Now suppose there were a Turing machine H that
could solve the Halting Problem. Starting from H, one
could build a “perverse” machine P that acts as fol-
lows: P takes its input data x and determines (by using
H a s a subroutine) whether the particular machine M,
which is paired with x, would halt or run forever on
input x; and P then perversely either halts or enters
an infinite loop, whichever causes it to behave differ-
ently from M. Now P has succeeded in behaving dif-
ferently from every machine; specifically,it differs from
machine M on the particular input data x that is
matched with M in the pairing. But this is impossible,
since P would have to differ evenfrom itself. So H can-
not exist after all.
Turing’s method of proof is very general. It applies
equally well to show that itis impossible to write a
Pascal program, say, that can test Pascal programs
for infinite loops. If this were the end of the story,
Turing’s result would merely establish certain limits
on self-referentialapplication, suggesting, for example,
that if one wants to test programs written in a partic-
ular language, then one must write the tests in a differ-
ent language. But at the same time that Turing was
describing his machines, Alonzo Church and various
other logicians were proving that manymodels of
computation (including Turing machines) thatare
superficially very different are in fact all equivalent.
As a result of this work, theChurch-Turing Thesis has
become generally accepted: any method of perform-
ing a computation that might conceivablybe proposed
in thefuture,nomatter how apparently powerful,
will turn out to be performable by a Turing machine.
This implies that the Halting Problem is unsolvable,
not merely in the sense that no Turing machine can
solve it, but that more generally, no computational