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Alexander Ian Smith (born April 15, 1987 in Birmingham), an undergraduate studying electronic and...

Alexander Ian Smith (born April 15, 1987 in Birmingham), an undergraduate studying electronic and computer engineering at the University of Birmingham, UK, is known for winning the Stephen Wolfram's research prize in October 2007 for a proof that a particular 2,3 Turing machine is the simplest Universal Turing machine possible. Alex Smith grew up in Birmingham, attending King Edward VI Five Ways, and was an alternative for the UK International Mathematical Olympiad team. His parents are both teachers at University of Birmingham. Although at first he thought that the machine proposed by Stephen Wolfram was not universal because its behavior seemed to him too simple for it to be a universal Turing machine with slightly more complicated behaviour than a regular (non-universal) Turing machine, he eventually changed his mind and finally devised a formal proof of the proposition that Wolfram's candidate was indeed universal. Turing machine