Here's a short video clip of the Mk2 Turing machine working at Derby Maker Faire. It took about 6 weeks from sending the plans off to RazorLab to having a working machine at the Handmade Digital exhibition in Manchester. There are still lots of handmade parts in the Turing machine, but having the majority of it laser-cut has made it much easier to construct.
There are also a lot of bugs in the design. One of the great things about the laser-cut design is that I can record these bugs as though they were software defects, which they are in many ways. The design for the machine is on github, at https://github.com/jmacarthur/millihertz/tree/master/scad/newbuild, although it may not be very intelligible at the moment. I really need to spend more time documenting the design.
Lots of people have said they like the shiny black laser-cut Turing machine, and others have said they prefer the scrappy style of the original. Personally I'd prefer to hand-make the final version out of solid brass, but that will be several iterations away.
4 comments:
Hi,
I found your project via YouTube.
Your project is very interesting, but as far as I know, there isn't any known universal machine with 2 states and 5 symbols (According to Wikipedia, there is a 2 states 18 symbols machine).
But there is a 2,4 weakly universal machine. So the title of your video is not very accurate^^
Actually, I'm a member of a student group who made a mechanical Turing machine out of Lego bricks. I'm happy to find your own because there are many technical differences. We used pneumatic logic, we can modify very easily our transition function, and ours is really slow (about 100 seconds per cycle, but we hope to take it down to 30 seconds)
Our homepage is http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/rubens, if you want to take a look. Actually, there isn't any documentation at all, but we plan to make few.
And also, I'm french so my english may not be very idiomatic^^
Elie
Hi Elie,
This is the first time I have come across the idea of weak universality, but you are correct, the 2 state, 5 symbol machine is weakly universal.
The (2,5) machine is described by Wolfram at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/UniversalTuringMachine.html; he calls it a universal Turing machine, so I did too. But I will make the distinction clear in future.
I have seen the videos of your pneumatic Turing machine before and I think it is very impressive. I do not think 100 seconds per cycle is very slow. Mine works at around 20 seconds per cycle, but it is very unreliable, so the speed is unimportant.
I would very much like to read some documentation on your machine if you produce it. I can read a little French, so that would be a good opportunity to practise it.
Jim
Hobbing is a machining process for making gears, splines, and sprockets on a hobbing machine, which is a special type of milling machine. polygon turning machine or splines are progressively cut into the workpiece by a series of cuts made by a cutting tool called a hob. Compared to other gear forming processes it is relatively inexpensive but still quite accurate, thus it is used for a broad range of parts and quantities.
polygon turning machine is the best in its class of machinery
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