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.'"

Comments

Technically...

[Corporate Troll]

Purely technically, a Turing Machine that hasn't infinite tapes is simply a Finite State Machine. You cannot build a "real" Turing Machine. Doesn't make his creation less interesting though :-)

Re: I found that no one had ever actually built on

[Corporate Troll]

And you'd be wrong.... Computers are Finite State Machines with an insane number of states.

Re:You're Doing It Wrong

[trurl7]

RTFA. I know that's a sin, but seriously, do. You'll discover you are wrong.

The microcontroller loads the program as written in ascii on an SD card. It also can write the initial data onto the tape. After that, the computation is, indeed, performed by the "machine". Hence the optical reader for the characters on the tape.

Setting aside the Turing stuff...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

The hardware is very elegant and well-done. The guy is a multi-talented geek of the highest order.

Re:You're Doing It Wrong

[ircmaxell]

Actually, sorry but you're wrong. Alan Turing himself described a Turing Machine as a "Logical Computing Machine" which consisted of:

an infinite memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behavior of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine.

Now, let's look at how this works. It reads a symbol from the tape using the camera. Then it checks its internal state, and sees what it should do with that symbol (should it change the symbol, change the state, and/or how should it move). Then it does that action and moves on to the next symbol as instructed by the last "rule". Considering that the only thing that the machine keeps track of from position to position is the state, it is indeed a Turing machine. The microprocessor's job (as he states) is to act as the read/write head for the machine. Turing never described HOW the head worked, just WHAT it did. And this head performs EXACTLY what Turing described. And that's why this is a Turing machine. If you wrote a program on your computer that did this, it too would be a Turing machine. The delineation is in how it handles and stores states, not the method in which it "processes" data... And Turing's original work described a Turing machine as using a person to perform the actions (but strictly following the ruleset). So I fail to see how this could possibly NOT be a Turing machine...

Re:hmmm

[FooAtWFU]

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.

I'm impressed

[the_other_chewey]

Im impressed: For an infinite tape, the reels look very compact.