There's also a 1936 first edition of the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society where mathematician Alan Mathison Turing introduces the concept of a "universal machine, " an imaginary computing device.

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Since the days of Alan Turing, the promise of a digital computer has been that of a universal machine, one that can be a word processor one minute and a robot brain the next.

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Although they know that by playing with these 19 numbers, they can make the Universal Machine do lots of things, Dr Chua, Dr Roska and their colleagues cannot easily predict which sets of numbers will result in what behaviour.

ECONOMIST: Analogue computing

Universal's Hot Tub Time Machine is scoring decent reviews.

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So if you pop in a DVD "infected" with Protect DVD-Video, it can't be read by Windows Media Player, Media Center Edition, or any DirectShow-based software, thanks to a Universal Disc Format that tricks your machine into believing that the IFO file is zero bytes long.

ENGADGET: Protect DVD-Video prevents discs from playing on your PC

Two nearly universal business problems are prime candidates for machine learning, Tennant says.

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Some users aren't waiting for the experts to come up with a universal standard but are trying to solve the problem, language by language and machine by machine.

CNN: COMMUNICATION