Today’s Google Doodle Is An Actual Turing Machine by John Biggs

John Biggs writes, "Today’s Google Doodle is a working Turing machine that contains six puzzles. Sophia Foster-Dimino on Google’s Doodle team built the app in honor of Alan Turing’s 100th birthday."

Photo: British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954)

What’s a Turing machine? It’s not an actual machine, per se, but a thought experiment that allowed for the advent of digital computing.

…an unlimited memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares, on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behaviour of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine. Any symbol on the tape may therefore eventually have an innings.

Photo: techcrunch.com

Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown posthumously apologized to Turing in 2009.
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Source: techcrunch.com