Turing Machines

It really matters for coders in 2023

A Turing Machine is a an abstract computational device intended to investigate the limits of computing.

It is important to note that there aren’t any real Turing machines. They are mathematical models an as such exist as a concept that exists in the abstract rather than a physical machine.

That isn’t to say that physical implementations of Turing machines, however they do rather struggle with having unlimited tape (more on that later).

History

Turing machines were invented in 1936 by British Mathematician Alan Turing as an automatic machine (only later would the theoretical machine be termed a Turing machine).

Turing machines can help us conceptualize about computing as abstract machines to investigate the extent and limitations of computing.

This article is a quick look at Turing machines, towards the bottom we can see that the Church-Turing thesis means that Turing machines sit at the *top* of the hierarchy of computer science rather than the bottom.

Inputs

the input of a Turing machine is actually the initial state of the machine.

The input therefore consists of: