Cannon Design Blog

The information we can learn from Legos never ceases to amaze me. Nor does the power of the imagination.

Reading this Fast Company post earlier today regarding a group from the Netherlands who used Legos to make a Turing Machine  -  I learned a great deal about Alan Turing, the father of computer science. The Turing Machine is essentially a computer boiled down to its purest, simplest form – except its imaginary.  Turing conceived this machine before any actual computers existed as a simple thought experiment that would help him illuminate just what, exactly, a computer could do. It turns out that all you need to “compute” something is a paper tape divided into cells, a “write head” that can place marks on the tape or remove them, one cell at a time; and a table of instructions for how the “write head” should move backwards or forward along the tape.

Now, on the 100^th anniversary of Turing’s birth, this team from Netherlands created a Turing machine to show the world exactly what it can do. What’s remarkable is that the Turing machine is capable of performing any and all tasks a modern computer can achieve. Here’s a brief video that really illustrates the machine.

LEGO Turing Machine from ecalpemos on Vimeo.

Cynthia Hilliers - 02 Jul 2012

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