u/abudabuin r/compsci • Recommends
Fully mechanical Turing machine requires no electricity
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#turingmachine#mechanicalcomputer#makerfaire
Mechanical Turing machine
Jim MacArthur
371 subscribers • 1 video on Hallway
- Recommended by 1 person: 1 in engineering communities.
Beginner. No background in the topic needed.
60K views15 years ago1 recommendation
HardwareComputer scienceComputation and complexityRetro computing
A demonstration of a fully mechanical universal Turing machine that uses ball bearings for memory and requires no electricity.
This is a mechanical universal Turing machine (given an infinite track). It uses ball bearings as its memory and has no electrical components, other than a small motor used to drive it. This is a quick overview video filmed at Maker Faire UK 2011.Why it's here
1 person recommends thisWhat people say. Recommended as a fascinating physical implementation of a theoretical Turing machine.
Moments people linked to
u/abudabuin r/compsci • Mentions
On “UCLA's 1948 Mechanical Computer”
Here's an actual mechanical Turing machine (bonus points: no electricity required!).
link to this video
u/abudabuin r/compsci • Mentions
On “Social scientist grad tries to understand CPUs, epic fail ensues, plz set me straight”
…hrough its paces. As I said above, in a modern computer, an electronic clock plays this role of stepping transistors through their paces, but the principle is the same.
The mathematician Alan Turing described the first general purpose computer, and that machine was capable of doing all of the computations of any modern day computer. Checkout the link to this video in the "mechanical" link above. Just pause and soak that in for a moment - that primitive device (given enough tape) is capable of doing any computation your fancy 2014 laptop is.
For that reason we call general purpose computers "Turing-complete". They are all equivalent to each other in terms of the computations they can do. The only d…
u/Geohumpin r/compsci • Mentions
On “Why are Turing machines more commonly taught in Cs than lambda calculus?”
Short video of an actual mechanical turing machine
A Turing machine is ***not just*** "A purely mathematical concept". Its a prototype of a very basic Von Neumann architecture computer.
##A real, actual physical computer.
See one here: link to this video
This seems to be the piece missing from what some of you were told.
Turing machines can be real and are. The only thing special to note about real Turing machines is that their infinite tapes are using very short instances of "infinity"...
A number of people have built turing machines, this page has some pics
https://www.google.com/search?q=mechanical+turing+machine&num=100&client=firefox-a&hs=RKx&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=isch&tbo=…