In short, it's a minimalist computer, invented in 1936 by Alan Turing.

While minimalistic in it's design, it is in fact Turing Complete.

In short, universal Turing Machines are amazing! Such a simplistic design that is able to compute anything that is computeable - count me in! 🤩

To learn more about Turing Machines, I highly recommend this video by Computerphile.

In this project, I opted for minimalism.

Since the Turing Machine is a minimalist device in itself, I, too, opted for a bare-bones approach using only JavaScript, HTML and CSS for this project.

The Turing Machine I wrote is highly interactive and customizeable:

You can customize the head's 🤖 starting state and position:

You can define your own, custom set of rules or you can load a pre-defined ruleset:

You can also choose your own starting-values for the tape:

And finally, you can adjust the calculation-speed (the time per interval for one step) of the Turing Machine:

When you run the Turing Machine, several live-metrics are displayed for the head, as well as a live-version of the tape:

From left to right, you can see various data about the head 🤖:

• The current state of the head
• The head's next state
• The head's current position
• The direction the head will move next

At the bottom, there is a live-version of the tape and it's current data:

• All the data (the 0's and 1's) that are written on the tape are displayed and updated in realtime
• In the upper row, here's a small robot-head 🤖 indicating where the head of the Turing Machine is currently located above the tape
• The bottom-row shows all the data that the tape currently holds, and is updated each step
• The current field of the tape that the head is processing, is highlighted in blue

I was looking forward to coding this legandary "computer before there were computers".

You'll learn a lot coding your own version of the Turing Machine, I highly recommend it!

Plus, it's just satisfying to watch it rattle up and down the tape! ☺