Comments on: Homebrew Turing Machine

By: cbuchner1

cbuchner1 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Weren’t turing machines supposed to also store their program on tape?

Putting it on SD card seems like taking a short cut.

Would have been faster to use magnetic tape instead of the optical one. ;)

By: Roy Trumbull

Roy Trumbull — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Two papers were written on the computability of numbers. One was by Turning and the other by Alonzo Church. Turning came to the U.S. to study with Church at Princeton.
When he was back in England working on a more efficient way to decode the Enigma machine, electronic were pretty primitive. He needed a delay line to do a logical operation with an earlier result. It was an acoustic delay line and used a mixture of alcohol and water in a glass tube. The preferred liquid was gin right out of the bottle.

By: Crashproof

Crashproof — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

But will it run Crysis?

By: blkhawk

blkhawk — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yes it will. It might need a tad more tape tho.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Would be awesome if it used a wider variety of symbols, say Mandarin, and pronounced them when it read them.

By: Chentzilla

Chentzilla — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

You know that classic Turing machine has infinite tape, right?

By: dhasenan

dhasenan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Technically, it’s a linear bounded automaton, but I won’t quibble — it’s awesome.

By: Genteel Bartender

Genteel Bartender — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I would be much more impressed if it were a Hot Tub Turing Machine.

By: AirPillo

AirPillo — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I feel really weird saying this, but… it was oddly beautiful seeing it write out those nice, perfect ones and zeroes.

That tickled some sort of really neurotic pleasure center in my brain.

By: jphilby

jphilby — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Put this guy together with Trimpin for some *real* fun!

By: skeletoncityrepeater

skeletoncityrepeater — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

As a BS in CS I would like to argue that the Turing machine is not simply a ‘thought experiment’ but a _revolutionary_ model in computing theory. In my Finite Automata and Grammars class (the hardest class I ever took) it was proven to me that if you can build a Turing machine on paper to solve a problem, then it is therefore mechanically or electronically computable.

By: Taliesin

Taliesin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

That is just awesomely cool.

Here is this extremely sophisticated, industrialized *realization* of a Turing machine actually emulating (with absurd precision) the theoretical idea that inspired it in the first place. Isn’t that irony delicious?

And that playfulness extends out to the maker who created it. He obviously delighted in the painstaking work he took, just like the machine he built could be said to “delight” in painstakingly performing this simple, abstract computation. A computation that harnesses resources inside the machine’s controller chip that of course vastly exceed its own complexity.

Far out!

By: massspecgeek

massspecgeek — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

What do the 10 k’s do? You’d think you’d need more of the other letters — k isn’t very common, in English at least, so you’d expect the machine to be loaded up with e’s or a’s or t’s instead. Weird.

By: AirPillo

AirPillo — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thought experiments can still be revolutionary, just ask Einstein. Relativity started as a series of thought experiments.

By: imag

imag — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

That is awesome. That video made my morning. Thanks Mike!

By: semiotix

semiotix — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I desperately want to break into this guy’s house while he’s away and write a blocky, machine-like “2″ at the end of whatever tape he’s got loaded into it.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just….magnificent!

By: querent

querent — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

pure awesomeness. beautiful in conception and execution. thanks mike!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is awesome. I can’t believe how polished the whole project is. I could easily see this thing churning away on a pedestal in a museum. Excellent work Mr. Davey!