Tag Archives: alanturing

A Turing Machine

Now this is inspired. Mike Davey has built an actual Turing Machine.

A bit of background for non-CS people out there. A Turing Machine is a thought machine postulated by father of modern computing, and persecuted hero of World War II, Alan Turing. It was described as a machine that with a read-write head and infinite roll of tape that could pass back and forth under the head. Symbols could be read from the tape and then written back to the tape. What symbols, and where they were written would defined by rules that were triggered based on the symbols read from the tape.

In modern parlance, this is a machine whose behavior is controlled not through hardwiring, but through software.

Mike Davey isn’t the first person to build a Turing machine. (There’s at least one Lego Turing Machine.) But I do think he’s one of the few that built a machine that looks like a Turing Machine.

Video after the jump.
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