Much of today's automation can be contributed to Turing machines. Discuss who Turing was and how his work relates to what is being done today in the exciting field of machine computation.

Question

anonymous · Answer

as I've read, Turing machine is just a modified finite state machine which exists only in the mind. It's a machine which may move along a tape of infinite length dividied to boxes. I've mentioned it resembles a FSM since with respect to the state and the number it is pointing at, it gives an output and may or may not move to another state. The only difference is that in TM, it may move to two of its neighboring boxes. Another thing is that given an input, it will give an output which may replace so that for every state and input, you specify three things, the output it will give, to what direction will it move on next, and to what state will it change to.

anonymous · Answer

for example you have
|dw:1340248675904:dw|
the number 5 which is at the tail of the arrow indicates the current state of the TM. and the number the arrow is pointing at will be like the input which is the number the TM will replace. now if you have the information:
     .......  4 .......
.
.
5         1L2
.
.
.
this means that when the state is 5 and the input which arrow is pointing at is four, you change the number 4 to 1 then move to the neighboring number on the left and go to state 2