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LEGO Turing Machine

Category: Technology
Posted on: February 28, 2009 1:51 PM, by Greg Laden

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Comments

That was so funny. :D

When I was 12 or so I made a 5 bit computer from LEGO TECHNIC.

Posted by: Tor A H | February 28, 2009 4:00 PM

awesome.

some people must have lots of time....

Posted by: jay | February 28, 2009 7:48 PM

I want it!

Posted by: Jackal | February 28, 2009 9:26 PM

This is seriously awesome. There have been many articles written about Turing Machines in the 73 years since his original article in 1936, but they all have had an assumption that it's so obvious that they can be built that few people have actually sat down and done it. Even then, while there have been a small number of mechanical TM's constructed, none of them have actually been Universal, with the ability to execute a program that emulates a different TM. I've been watching for about 25 years now, and this is the first realized mechanical UTM that I've ever heard of. But even this one appears to have its Finite State Machine component in electronics rather than mechanical form. The SteamPunk challenge remains open...

Posted by: George McKee | March 1, 2009 3:20 AM

George McKee is right -- building a Turing Machine with Mindstorms gear is cheating. When I saw that I was expecting something like the old tic-tac-toe computers built out of Tinkertoys (the original used to be at the Boston Computer Museum, while a later model was written up in Scientific American by the formerly-sane AK Dewdney).

The best you can say is that it's a Turing Machine simulator powered by an actual Turing Machine. Impressive modeling, but not much of an accomplishment really.

Posted by: Brian X | March 1, 2009 11:57 AM