Programming a Turing Machine

It was the computer that started it all, albeit in theory. Mike Bedford shows you how to program a Turing Machine and put it through its paces.

- Mike Bedford

Alan Turing is probably best known for his pioneering work on code-breaking at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. In playing a key role in developing the electro-mechanical Bombe that was used to crack the Enigma cipher, Turing had a major impact on shortening World War II by an estimated two years and saving as many as 14 million lives.

Despite having been dubbed the “Father of Modern Computing”, however, his contributions to general-purpose computing are less well-appreciated. And here it’s interesting to note that his design for the ACE computer, a cut-down version of which was eventually built by the National Physics Laboratory in 1950, predated the Manchester Baby, the world’s first stored-program computer, by three years. Arguably, though, his biggest contribution to computing was his vision for a machine that was never actually built, and would have been totally impractical had it ever become a physical reality. This was the so-called Turning Machine and here we look at this model of computing and see how to program it using a couple of simulators.

Turning Machines