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The TMD-1 is a Turing machine demonstrator

Arduino TeamSeptember 13th, 2020

According to Michael Gardi, although you can find numerous stunning Turing machine implementations on the Internet, their complexity tends to detract from the simplicity of what a Turing machine actually does. In order to easily show how they work, he decided to create a demonstrator with the actual calculations handled by an Arduino Mega.

The console, dubbed TMD-1, displays a “tape” state on the top of the device using eight servo-controlled flip tiles that write 1s or 0s, while a series of lighted arrows indicate the program’s position. On the bottom surface, users can program instructions with magnetic tiles, and read the current machine state via LEDs.

It’s a slick design — as seen in the short demo clip below — and more details on the build can be found in Gardi’s tutorial.

Boards:Mega
Categories:Arduino