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Comment by dane-pgp

5 years ago

That makes me wonder if someone has ever written a scientific paper proving that the bureaucratic processes in place at their company are Turing Complete. You can imagine some sort of Rule 110 cellular automaton being implemented in TPS reports.

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dane-pgp

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TeMPOraL  5 years ago

A cellular automaton over office documents would be a nice thing to try! That said, a proof of turing-completeness of bureaucracy is relatively trivial:

  FROBNICATION QUERY      ID [#1234]

  1. Requester data
     [bunch of boxes]
  1a. (*) Details on stuffs
     [bunch of boxes]
  1b. (*) Details on different stuffs
     [bunch of boxes]
  (...)
  4. Additional documents
    - [Frobnication Registration #432]
    - [Frobnication Query #1111]

  --
  (*) - Fill section a) if $something. Fill section b) if $somethingelse.

With sections 1a/1b implementing conditional branching, and section 4 implementing storage.

Igelau  5 years ago

> proving that the bureaucratic processes... are Turing Complete

It's called COBOL