Alan Turing: 1912-06-23/1954-06-07. In celebration of his hundredth birthday, I made a movie. (It's an animated gif, more than half a megabyte, so if you've got a slow connection it might take a little while.)
Alan Turing was one of the founders of computer science, played a key role in the decryption of Enigma-encrypted messages in WW2, and then his life ended very tragically.
I'm not a(n) historian, so if you want to learn more about his life (and you should), start with the wikipedia page to which I linked; I'd also recommend reading about Bletchley Park (but don't just read wikipedia; there are several books about WW2 activities at Bletchley Park that are full of all sorts of fun and/or amazing stories).
I'm choosing to celebrate Alan Turing's birthday by celebrating one of his inventions. He described something which is now known as a Turing machine. It is, conceptually, an extremely simple device, yet it is capable of computing anything that is computable by any computer. Here is a movie of a Turing machine. There are lots of ways to represent (draw) a Turing machine; I've chosen to represent it as a pair of cabinets with drawers; each pair of drawers corresponds to one state.
 |
I'm using a notation in which the ‘next-state” pointer is relative (up or down the cabinet of drawers); the arrows indicate which direction to move the tape. I'll leave it to you to figure out what this Turing machine is doing. (It's not a universal machine!)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Commenting might not work. You can try and see what happens, who knows, it might work. (It'll show a message “Your comment was published” if it worked.) If it didn't work, try hitting the “Post Comment” button again. Still didn't work? Hit it harder this time! (Seriously. It seems to work the third time, and then always after that, unless you clear some browsing data. I'm trying to fix it.)