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Home-Built Turing Machine
stronghawk writes "The creator of the Nickel-O-Matic is back at it and has now built a Turing Machine from a Parallax Propeller chip-based controller, motors, a dry-erase marker and a non-infinite supply of shiny 35mm leader film. From his FAQ: 'While thinking about Turing machines I found that no one had ever actually built one, at least not one that looked like Turing's original concept (if someone does know of one, please let me know). There have been a few other physical Turing machines like the Logo of Doom, but none were immediately recognizable as Turing machines. As I am always looking for a new challenge, I set out to build what you see here.'"
Actually, in a sense, you can. The Turing machine doesn't require an infinite tape, just a tape of arbitrary length. Basically, you need to be able to always add more tape. Eventually, of course, the universe will run out of mass for you to make tape out of, but the machine is still a proper Turing machine. The distinction may seem meaningless, but consider the set of all finite bitstrings. This set will not contain any infinitely long strings, but it will contain arbitrarily long string. However long you want your string, there's one in the set, and a longer one, but no infinitely long ones. There's a definite difference between arbitrary finite length and infinite length. I've always found that this realization makes the Turing Machine just a little bit more real.
Well, if you're going to make a Turing machine run something equivalent to Conway's Game of Life, forget the random: have the simulation be A Turing Machine in Conway's Game of Life.
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