Wolfram 2,3 Turing Prize winner announced

Kathryn Cramer tells Boing Boing:

The Wolfram 2,3 Turing Prize winner was announced this morning: a
20-year old engineering student named Alex Smith who learned about the
contest from a chat room. Link.

The write-up in Nature is here.

Alex Smith, a undergraduate
electrical engineering student at the University of Birmingham in the
United Kingdom, has proven that a primitive type of computer known as
a 2,3 Turing machine can solve every computational problem there is.

And Stephen Wolfram's blog entry on it is here.

Smith's 40-something page proof is here, proving that the Turing
machine is "universal": PDF Link.

There's also a piece in New Scientist which has some nice bio
material on Alex Smith here.