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A working Turing Machine was submitted to Lego Ideas, consisting of approximately 2,900 parts and a bucketload of extreme cleverness. The original machine was devised by mathematician Alan Turing in 1936. Turing's idea was a hypothetical system that could simulate any computer algorithm. The design consisted of an infinitely …
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for someone to port Linux to the Lego Technic Turing machine. ;)
I still remember coding simple functions in Turing machine 4-tuples as part of a third year undergrad. mathematical logic course - must have been scarred for life:) - actually I remember it wasn't too bad one you got the hang of it.
The Antikythera mechanism was the ultimate cosmological supercomputer of its day (and its success the reason why prime numbers gained such mystical significance).
Lego Technic, Meccano, carved from the bones of a pregnant horse, who cares, I just want those giant cogs with prime numbers of teeth.
It all rather reminded me of the old electro-mechanical kit from years gone by, my experience being at school where we had 5-hole punch tape machines, some blind, some with teletypes. Or the insides of the even older tickertape family of machines and (electro-)mechanical calculators such as Comptometers.
Ah-ha! Indeed, a model of the CROCUS Reactor has also been submitted to Lego Ideas (safety considerations?) ... just the ticket for that tiny crank!
The whole list of current Ideas is quite colorful ... and at one time (2020) or another (2023) a Pascaline was proposed (see also 2016), but not selected I guess ...
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Those who want me to spend money and waste time on this, upvote the idea. :-) As a Lego person and computer programmer, it would be required by my guild memberships to buy one and build one. Given the size of the tape, I wonder how much one can make it do? There isn't anywhere enough state to make a MIPS-3000 emulator to boot Linux on. Even with a tape large enough, it would likely take years to boot!
Oh, Zed release at: http://www.graysage.com/Zed/New
Ah-ha! Refering to R3000 emulation deftly channels Dmitry Grinberg's Linux on the 4004 adventure ... that his 740 kHz Intel chip ran like a 70 Hz MIPS (Booting in under 5 days) suggests that the only thing the Lego Turing Machine will need (on top of a very long tape) ... is just a very fast motor to turn its cranks! Say 6 x 10⁷ rpms ... and voilà!
Common mistake.
At some theoretical, philosophical level it makes a difference.
Of course any tape or capacity for any physical machine is not infinite.
Also using a register is a bit of a cheat but makes things muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch easier to implement AND RUN, and really nothing conceptual is lost but a bit of purity. It is informative to see just how painful it is without a register, ... or two.
Yes, it makes a difference if you want to fit the machine into a finite universe. If the universe you are in happens to be infinite itself, I think the difference vanishes.
BTW people have been building TMs for many years. This isn't the first Lego attempt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYw2ewoO6c4 is 15 years old.
Gisbert Hasenjaeger was building Turing machines before 1960 (look him up in Wikipedia). The amusing thing is that Hasenjaeger's job in Germany during WW II was attempting to break Enigma, and his failure reassured Germany that it was safe. Meanwhile, the inventor of the Turing machine was breaking Enigma...
A tape loop is also unbounded.
Best would be if you build it in a projective Universe and make sure it stays flat, because then, when you get past the restaurant and come back on the other side, you will be using the other side of the tape, so the data string is twice as long as the Universe!
Of course, coiling the tape on a couple of reels would be cheating.
P.S. Infinite, indefinitely large and unbounded are indeed not the same things. Unfortunately, the halting problem and uncertainties about the time the Universe will last for mean that you don't know which tape to use.
Reading some old source material about the Turing machine suggests to me that he had an interesting idea but the whole concept is ass-backwards. The giveaway to me is the notion of states, the idea of a state variable that can guide the operation of the machine as it processes the tape which with the notation he devised looks a lot like a machine instruction. This begs the question as to what's driving what -- are the instructions driving the tape or the tape driving the instructions.
It wouldn't be unusual to find that he'd got the idea of sequential programming almost right -- it was 1936, after all -- but I think that von Neumann's architecture is a lot more practical.
(This along with some aspects of Bombe development suggest that Turing might have had a bit of a blind spot when it comes to working with others -- he's really smart, has got great ideas but was incapable of dealing with the notion that others have ideas as well.)
(I'm probably going to get slapped down for this but in my defense I have been reading a reprint of the original paper(s) recently.....)
But the Turing machine is a concept machine that provides a minimalist design that can be shown to be able to complete any general computing task. It is its use in this conceptual role, rather than a usefully practical computing engine, that makes it a foundation of modern Computer Science - in particular being able to show that another architecture is able to implement a Turing Machine (that it is Turing Complete) provides a critical insight about an architecture.
The von Neumann architecture is concerned with the architectures of practical machines (but can also be applied to more abstract architectures).
I don't think anybody would seriously tout a physical implementation of a Turing Machine as a model for a usefully practical computing engine.
"Turing might have had a bit of a blind spot when it comes to working with others"
Hmm, I think he would not be alone in that respect - even in the context of WWII where the stakes were so high there were plenty of "personalities" who seemed unable to "play nicely" with others.