Well the interesting thing would be if that old lesson were violated.
Of course it's sealed forever for a specific definition of 'compute,' but I'm still open to the idea that we find something which resembles computation enough that we call it the same thing, yet its precise definition is different enough from the one used in connection with contemporary theory of computation that old proofs of universality won't necessarily apply to it.
That said... it seems unlikely to me that the Actor model does something non-trivially beyond what Turing machines are capable of, since it would likely be better known, and we would see Chomsky's hierarchy expanded to hold another class, etc. (Unless it goes beyond Turing Machines by being non-linguistic in some way, which could certainly be interesting. Maybe dealing with non-sequential symbols or something?)
Of course it's sealed forever for a specific definition of 'compute,' but I'm still open to the idea that we find something which resembles computation enough that we call it the same thing, yet its precise definition is different enough from the one used in connection with contemporary theory of computation that old proofs of universality won't necessarily apply to it.
That said... it seems unlikely to me that the Actor model does something non-trivially beyond what Turing machines are capable of, since it would likely be better known, and we would see Chomsky's hierarchy expanded to hold another class, etc. (Unless it goes beyond Turing Machines by being non-linguistic in some way, which could certainly be interesting. Maybe dealing with non-sequential symbols or something?)