[geeks] Re: [rescue] RE: Absolutely nothing to do with 'Small schools.& elections'

[Ken Hansen]

The definition of a turing machine is that you have a box, and a tape running through it, infinitely long in either direction. The tape is one symbol "wide" (think movie negative).

The turing machine starts in an initial state. Then, based on the symbol/value of the frame of the tape inside the machien, it can either move to the left or right a discrete number of frames, and mark the current frame with a new value.

As the machine dances through these operations, it will be in different states, most likely related to the last symbol read from the tape.

Nothing I am aware of says the turing machine can or can not have a display indicating the current state of the machine (when you work through examples in school, you typically have a table that you fill in with the state of the machine at various points in the processing of the tape.).

That is about the sum total of my memory of turing machines, any more details will require me to pull out my Discrete Mathematics text from 15 years ago...

Now, the Turing test, is a whole different thing... ;^)

Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: Joshua D. Boyd [mailto:jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 3:58 PM
To: 'geeks at sunhelp.org'
Subject: RE: [geeks] Re: [rescue] RE: Absolutely nothing to do with
'Small schools.& elections'


So, would the display be part of the tape, or is each display state a
machine state?  Would these just be a machine state for each pixel in the
display?

--
Joshua Boyd

On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Ken Hansen wrote:

> Display? We couldn't even imagine a computer being able to display anything, we just "knew" what was going on in the game... Geez, anyone can play if you can just see the game in front of you... ;^)
> 
> Ken
> (Seriously though, I know of no reason why a turing machine couldn't have a display - it has a state, and it needs to communicate it to the user, so I would imagine in the strictest sense it would have to have a display, but the display may not be of a form familiar to today's "pampered" users, maybe a series of blue LEDs, or a scrolling LED array, like those found in grocery stores... ;^)
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joshua D. Boyd [mailto:jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 3:18 PM
> To: 'geeks at sunhelp.org'
> Subject: RE: [geeks] Re: [rescue] RE: Absolutely nothing to do with
> 'Small schools.& elections'
> 
> 
> Is it really a turing machine if it can drive a display?
> 
> --
> Joshua Boyd
> 
> On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Ken Hansen wrote:
> 
> > Ever tried to play Doom on a Turing machine? That was rough... (but it did run Linux!)
> 
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