information:extraction, linguistic:paraphrasing
Success of the thesis

Other formalisms (besides recursion, the λ-calculus, and the Turing machine) have been proposed for describing effective calculability/computability. Kleene (1952) adds to the list the functions " reckonable in the system S " of Kurt Gödel 1936, and Emil Post 's (1943, 1946) " canonical systems ". In the 1950s Hao Wang and Martin Davis greatly simplified the one-tape Turing-machine model (see Post–Turing machine). Marvin Minsky expanded the model to two or more tapes and greatly simplified the tapes into "up-down counters", which Melzak and Lambek further evolved into what is now known as the counter machine model. In the late 1960s and early 1970s researchers expanded the counter machine model into the register machine, a close cousin to the modern notion of the computer. Other models include combinatory logic and Markov algorithms. Gurevich adds the pointer machine model of Kolmogorov and Uspensky (1953, 1958): "... they just wanted to... convince themselves that there is no way to extend the notion of computable function."

All these contributions involve proofs that the models are computationally equivalent to the Turing machine; such models are said to be Turing complete. Because all these different attempts at formalizing the concept of "effective calculability/computability" have yielded equivalent results, it is now generally assumed that the Church–Turing thesis is correct. In fact, Gödel (1936) proposed something stronger than this; he observed that there was something "absolute" about the concept of "reckonable in S ":

It may also be shown that a function which is computable in one of the systems S, or even in a system of transfinite type, is already computable in S. Thus the concept 'computable' is in a certain definite sense 'absolute', while practically all other familiar metamathematical concepts (e.g. provable, definable, etc.) depend quite essentially on the system to which they are defined...