Collaborate Disseminate
Origami can be an interesting starting point for a project, but we weren’t expecting [Thomas C. Hull] and [Inna Zakharevich]’s Turing complete origami computer. Starting with the constraint of flat …read more Continue reading Turing Complete Origami
We’ll beat everyone to the punch: yes, actually building a working Turing machine, especially one that uses a Raspberry Pi, is probably something that would have pushed [Allen Turing]’s buttons, …read more Continue reading TMD-3: Clever Hall Sensor Hack Leads to Better Turing Demo
One of the things we love best about the articles we publish on Hackaday is the dynamic that can develop between the hacker and the readers. At its best, the comment section of an article can be a model of collaborative effort, with readers’ ideas and suggestions making their way …read more
Continue reading TMD-2: A Bigger, Better, More Collaborative Turing Machine
For something that has been around since the 1930s and is so foundational to computer science, you’d think that the Turing machine, an abstraction for mechanical computation, would be easily understood. Making the abstract concepts easy to understand is what this Turning machine demonstrator aims to do.
The TMD-1 is …read more
Continue reading TMD-1 Makes Turing Machine Concepts Easy to Understand
Within normal rules of collectible card game Magic: The Gathering a player may find themselves constrained to only a single legal course of action forward. It’s a situation players could craft to frustrate their opponents, though the victims usually break free after a few moves. But under a carefully crafted …read more
Continue reading A (Card) Table-Top Turing Machine Of Magic: The Gathering Cards
Though as with so many independent inventors the origins of computing can be said to have been arrived at through the work of many people, Alan Turing is certainly one of the foundational figures in computer science. His Turing machine was a thought-experiment computing device in which a program performs operations upon symbols printed on an infinite strip of tape, and can in theory calculate anything that any computer can.
In practice, we do not use Turing machines as our everyday computing platforms. A machine designed as an academic abstract exercise is not designed for efficiency. But that won’t stop …read more
From Magic the Gathering decks to CSS, computers are everywhere. Continue reading Turing Completeness Is Where You Least Expect It
If you have ever thought that working out a Collatz sequence by hand was alright but lacked buttons and lights, the Collatz-o-matic by [mechatronicsguy] has you covered!
The device is a type of Tag system calculator. [mechatronicsguy] explains that a Tag system is a method of computing similar to a Turing machine; it consists of a read & write FIFO array (or tape or queue) of indeterminate length, and at every step the system reads the symbol at the “head”, deletes a fixed number of symbols from the “head”, and depending on what that first symbol was, appends one or …read more
Continue reading The Collatz-O-Matic: a State Machine with Style!
The recent movie “The Imitation Game” gave [Alan Turing] some well-deserved fame among non-computer types (although the historical accuracy of that movie is poor, at best; there have been several comparisons between the movie and reality). However, for people in the computer industry, Turing was famous for more than just helping to crack Enigma. His theoretical work on computing led to the Turing machine, which is still an important concept for reasoning about computers in a mathematical way. He also laid the foundation for the stored program computer that we take for granted today.
A Turing …read more
Mathematicians. If you let them use the concept of infinity, there’s almost nothing they won’t be able to prove. Case in point: the Turing machine. The idea is that with an infinite length of tape, one could build a thought-experiment machine with only a few instructions that should be able to compute anything that’s computable.
[Igor]’s Turing machine is one of the nicest we’ve ever seen built. The “tape” is significantly shorter than infinity, which limits the computations he can achieve, the use of 3D printing, electric contacts, and WS2812 RGB LEDs for the tape are profoundly satisfying.
A bit …read more
