Mad About Science: Strange turing machines

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

Bear with me on this one. We’re going to take a deep-dive into some serious theoretical mathematical principles without barraging your brain cells with huge strings of numbers and equations — all in 800 words or less.

Courtesy Pixabay.

A Turing machine isn’t a physical device, it’s more like a theoretical system of rules for a computational device to work properly. To work, it needs to be able to exist in a number of states (such as a starting state, like when your PC begins to boot up), an ability to read and write data like the head of a hard drive disk, and a tape that can store the altered data — or the actual hard drive disk, in the case of most PCs. It also needs a functional alphabet, which is used to represent the data it writes.

An object in the real world that can simulate the functions of a Turing machine is considered Turing complete, which is important to the nature of this article.

Your PC and phone are considered to incorporate a number of Turing-complete programs and components to achieve computational tasks — from your calculator to your Facebook app — and these devices are generally the first thing someone thinks about when they call something a Turing machine.

What if you want to build a Turing machine inside of your computer with a relatively simple source? This principle has been exercised in one of the most popular games in recent memory: Minecraft. Using networks of redstone, people have created simple machines that can be arrayed to build complex computers built inside of the game, with absolutely no external changes to the game or its code.

YouTube hosts a multitude of uploaded videos of people who slapped some blocks and redstone down in a very specific order to create calculators that would not only calculate mathematical equations, but display the answers like a handheld calculator in the real world, based on real-world mathematical principles.

If using a computer to build another computer doesn’t impress you, what about using trading cards to build a functional computer?

This isn’t like your phone or PC — it doesn’t have any display mechanisms, nor will it be able to run World of Warcraft on any setting, but it does function as a basic computer that can read and write data. Sort of.

I can’t take credit for this awesome example; I actually learned about this from watching Kyle Hill’s Because Science series on YouTube. If you’ve never heard of this series, drop everything and go to the library right now and use one of their actual computers to watch his video, “I Built a COMPUTER in Magic: The Gathering.”

In the video, Hill borrows ideas from mathematicians who built a very specific deck for Magic: The Gathering that is capable of creating a tape, and then reading, writing and destroying data on this tape to perform simple actions. It does this by using the game’s built-in colors and creature types as an alphabet, while using power and toughness as parameters for reading and writing data.

If you’re worried about the video being a giant, confusing slog of crazy math equations and difficult-to-understand concepts, dispel those fears now. Hill is extremely funny and passionate, while doing an incredible job at making the science easy to understand for anyone. Plus, he and I have the same hair, so that’s always a benefit.

Are you not excited by a $1,000 pile of colored paper being a functional computation device? Well how about something a little closer to your heart?

The cells of our heart are capable of functioning in a Turing-complete manner. Heart cells have been observed to follow the rules of logic gates, an important factor in computer science that involves one or more inputs leading to a single output. While a single logic gate isn’t Turing complete, it turns out that a whole bunch of them working together to power something like our heart over decades can be considered Turing complete. You’ve got a fleshy super-advanced computer stuffed into your skull and a juicy red one beating away in your chest.

One more cool bit of info I found out on that subject is that the scientists who figured that out used an Xbox 360 to test their simulations. Hopefully that one didn’t unleash the “red ring of death” on their experiment.

There are about a billion more things I’d love to geek out over, but I’ve already run out of words. If you want to learn about more unusual computers, you should ask the tech desk attendants at the Sandpoint library. Having worked there myself, I can tell you with unwavering certainty: they live for this stuff.