University of Birmingham Alex Smith has won a $25,000 prize for proving that the simplest possible Turing machine is in fact universal, Stephen Wolfram has announced.

“Perhaps one day there’ll even be practical molecular computers built from this very 2,3 Turing machine,” said Wolfram. “With tapes a bit like RNA strands, and heads moving up and down like ribosomes. When we think of nanoscale computers, we usually imagine carefully engineering them to mimic the architecture of the computers we know today…. But we don’t have to carefully build things up with engineering. We can just go out and search in the computational universe, and find things like universal computers–that are simple enough that we can imagine making them out of molecules.”