Brit Cruise

For years I struggled to clarify exactly what a Turing machine needs to do, and more importantly, how Turing conceived of it. Even after I finished a CS degree I wasn’t able to “build one from scratch” because I hadn’t yet independently realized what he had…

Recently I had a moment of insight and hit on an improved analogy for the “program” of a Turing machine, which Turing describes as “a book”. I took this one step further and clarified that each page in this book can be thought of as a unique state. A page contains a single instruction to follow (which takes the form of a conditional statement). This subtle step is something Turing didn’t include in his paper (instead he skipped ahead and simply refers to it as a ‘big table’, which can be tough to digest at first)

I feel this is the key to make the mechanism behind Turing machines more concrete and intuitive for the new learner. I hope Turing would approve of my modification to his analogy…and after reading his paper some 20 times, I can say with certainty that he would.

Here is the video on how it all works (this is also the 2nd last video in the CS series)

This entry was posted on May 17, 2017 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.