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It's sole purpose is to demonstrate to people in an accessable fashion what a turing machine is.. and I'd say that this does a swell job of that [at least, thei
by jps359 14y ago
It's sole purpose is to demonstrate to people in an accessable fashion what a turing machine is.. and I'd say that this does a swell job of that [at least, their video on vimeo does].
- camtarn 14y agoThe actual demonstration is kinda lacking - if you're observing the machine, you can't see what's going on in software, so there's still a layer of 'magic'. This isn't really much better than building a simple electronic computer with LEDs on each of its 32 bits of memory. In some ways it's actually worse: for the electronic computer there are less layers of abstraction (digital logic [adders, flipflops etc] > logic gates > transistors > semiconductor physics) than for NXT (scripting language > interpreter > real language > compiler > digital logic > ...). Even though the NXT language is probably easier to understand, it takes longer to explain if someone keeps asking "but how does that work underneath?"