Background on Turing, Church, and Their Groundbreaking Work

The Lambda Calculus

1. Wikipedia’s entry
2. An introduction to the lambda calculus and a toy interpreter from Monash University
3. An introduction to the lambda calculus with a practice reduction engine from UCSD

Post (or Tag) Machines

1. Jürg Nievergelt's Lecture Notes on Theory of Computation, Chapter 8, which describes Post machines, gives some examples, and then provides a proof of the Turing equivalence of Post machines
2. Mathworld’s page, an excellent introduction

Post Production Systems

1. Rule-based systems in artificial intelligence
2. Rule-based cognitive architectures

Markov Algorithms

1. Jürg Nievergelt's Lecture Notes on Theory of Computation, Chapter 1, which describes Post machines, gives some examples, and then provides a proof of the Turing equivalence of Post machines
2. Jürg Nievergelt's Lecture Notes on Theory of Computation, Chapter 8, which describes a proof of the Turing equivalence of Markov algorithms
3. Wikipedia’s entry, a much shorter introduction
4. Everything2’s page, including a discussion of programming languages based on Markov algorithms
5. A Markov algorithm simulator

Conway’s Game of Life

1. Math.com’s page on Life - the history, the rules, and an applet that lets you play the game
2. Wikipedia’s entry
3. A Universal Turing machine implemented in Conway's Game of Life
4. Game of Life Status Page
5. Another game to play: The irRegularGame of Life

One-Dimensional Cellular Automata

1. Wikipedia’s entry
2. Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science, online
3. Mathword’s page on Rule 110

DNA (and other sorts of biological) Computing

1. Home page for Len Adleman’s lab with links to their papers
2. Len Adleman’s Scientific American paper on DNA computing
3. Len Adleman’s Science paper on DNA computing
4. A survey by Mark Daley and Lila Kari