As a summer project I was thinking of building an entirely mechanical Turing machine - possibly with Lego. Has anyone attempted this? Does anyone have any advice on how to design this? Thanks.

">LEGO Turing machine commercial.

Stack based Turing machine.

Try making a mechanical brainfuck interpreter, it's a turing complete language, that would be very cool :)

Quote: Original post by Don Carnage

">LEGO Turing machine commercial.

That video annoys me for some reason... All they show is "reading" and "writing". Their machine has an LCD on top and probably chips inside, that ruins the point of it being a mechanical Turing machine.

Quote: Original post by Lode
Try making a mechanical brainfuck interpreter, it's a turing complete language, that would be very cool :)

But also truly insane ;)

Quote:

Quote: Original post by Don Carnage

">LEGO Turing machine commercial.

That video annoys me for some reason... All they show is "reading" and "writing". Their machine has an LCD on top and probably chips inside, that ruins the point of it being a mechanical Turing machine.

Well, it's a commercial. The lcd and software interface is probably for ease of use as well as for teaching about it, I don't think it simulates a mechanical TM. They made a blog telling all about it.

Quote: Original post by Don Carnage

Quote: Original post by Lode
Try making a mechanical brainfuck interpreter, it's a turing complete language, that would be very cool :)

But also truly insane ;)

Building brainfuck interpreters is not what is insane. Writing brainfuck programs is [smile]

[Edited by - phresnel on April 14, 2009 6:12:19 AM]

You can rather easily build simplest universal turing machine, I believe. Compiling for that machine could be a huge problem though ;) .

Quote: Original post by phresnel

Quote: Original post by Don Carnage

Quote: Original post by Lode
Try making a mechanical brainfuck interpreter, it's a turing complete language, that would be very cool :)

But also truly insane ;)

Building brainfuck interpreters is not what is insane. Writing brainfuck programs is [smile]

But it's still possible to write anything in BF! Try this program in a BF interpreter, it's a full adventure game :)

http://jonripley.com/i-fiction/games/LostKingdomBF.html

Quote: Original post by Lode

Quote: Original post by phresnel

Quote: Original post by Don Carnage

Quote: Original post by Lode
Try making a mechanical brainfuck interpreter, it's a turing complete language, that would be very cool :)

But also truly insane ;)

Building brainfuck interpreters is not what is insane. Writing brainfuck programs is [smile]

But it's still possible to write anything in BF! Try this program in a BF interpreter, it's a full adventure game :)

http://jonripley.com/i-fiction/games/LostKingdomBF.html

Certainly I know about the Lore of Turing Completeness. Interesting Link :)

But the pain of writing brainfuck is nowt against the Sinister Torment and Unspeakable Sorrow of Carving a Program out of Malbolge (Unshackled) Code.