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Mechanical Turing Machine in Wood
Richard Ridel
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- Presented by Richard Ridel
Beginner. No background in the topic needed.
570K views11 years ago1 recommendation
Computer scienceHistory and cultureComputation and complexityRetro computing
Richard Ridel demonstrates a fully functional mechanical Turing machine constructed entirely from wood.
This video is the result of six months of trial and error woodworking in my workshop. You can get a document on how it works here: 1drv.ms/b/s!ApWK5-smKacYbFTI0vWfgjiivUQWhy it's here
1 person recommends thisWhat people say. Recommended as a fascinating physical demonstration of a mechanical Turing machine.
u/lookmeatin r/compsci • Mentions
On “What does a Turing Machine have to do with computers?”
What do you think is a computer? If your definition has a "machine" in it, then you are wrong (at least you gave a definition that is too specific).
A computer is something or someone that solves problems. For a good while these were people that would write specific charts and then use those to do calculations on the fly. And I mean heavily, you could be on a boat that's getting bombarded and trying to do integrals to calculate the wind-effect and account for it on the next shot. They would also work a lot on decrypting stuff. Now there were computer machines, or mechanical computers. These where contraptions that could solve a specific problem in a very effective manner.
Turing wanted t…
u/anaerobic_lifeformin r/compsci • Mentions
On “Why the pc can do all this stuff?”
…, designed by smart people.
At the core of it, the processor is able to accept data that, when feed into the machine, make it behave in ways that are meaningful for a human observer. It looks like it shuffles data around but if you look carefully, you may notice that it performed an addition, for example. Take a look at a physical Turing machine: link to this video
A processor does not think, it only perform actions: transfer data from memory to register, add register with constant, put result back in memory, put a special value in a register, ...
Typically you represent high-level concepts by encoding thems: numbers? encode them in base 2. Images? let's have a grid of color points, each color being…