
Lego Turing Machine - kqr2
http://legoofdoom.blogspot.com/
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mct
I've spent some time pondering various methods of constructing a physical
Turing Machine off and on for a couple years now, ever since I was introduced
to them through mjd's Perl Quiz of the Week
(<http://perl.plover.com/qotw/r/024>). However, all of my designs were
deliberately non-electronic in nature. Personally, I find electromagnets,
motors, and relays to all be aesthetically acceptable in this pursuit, but
using a microprocessor to build a physical Turing Machine just somehow strikes
me as... unappealing.

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jodrellblank
You say that as if microprocessors aren't physical...

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RiderOfGiraffes
I suspect "mechanical" would be a better word. Microprocessors are mysterious
black[1] boxen, whereas relays, etc, are macro-sized and can be made at home
by hand.

[1] For some definition of "black".

~~~
mct
_I suspect "mechanical" would be a better word_

Yes, exactly. Thank you.

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edgeztv
Interesting fact about TMs - while their computibility is equivalent to
computers, the Big-O time for common algorithms is (possibly much) slower.
Many O(n) tasks on computers with RAM are O(n^2) on a TM. The only commonality
with computers in terms of time complexity is the Polynomial vs. Non-
polynomial boundary.

The same is true for any model of computation.

Despite this equivalence, it's orders of magnitude harder to program a TM than
the ugliest assembly language you've ever seen. This is one architecture that
desperately needs a compiler :)

~~~
kqr2
Turing Machine Compiler:

<http://www.breakingrobots.net/projects/tmc/>

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sspencer
The A-team theme really changed this from the "Whoa, cool!" category to the
rarefied "People need to see this NOW!" class.

Awesome use of an NXT.

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pkrumins
I didn't like that it did not show some small computation like counting of 1
bits or any other trivial computation.

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vivekkhurana
I love this one... So can we say now that 'computing is a child's play' ?

