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The TURING program simulates the operation of a
Turing Machine. Turing Machines are abstract models of primitive
digital computers. In fact, they are the most fundamental models
of all logical computations. Such a machine was conceived by the
British mathematician Alan Turing in 1935, long before digital
computers became established. Turing also worked on machines to
break the secret codes produced by the German Enigma machine in
World War II. TURING provides a tape with 999 elements, all of
which must be 0 or 1. These are unary digits, NOT BINARY digits.
In addition, the state transition table can hold up to 99 states.
These two capacities should be more than adequate for the demonstration
nature of this program. In addition, TURING has a full-screen
editor so that users may write, edit, and save their Turing Machine
programs. You can also vary the speed of animation and can run
programs in either an automatic mode or a single-step mode. Three
sample demonstration programs are included in the files called
TDEMO1.TXT, TDEMO2.TXT, and TDEMO3.TXT. There is also an independent
tutorial file, TURING.TXT, which is for first-time users. TURING.TXT
may be imported into any word processor and/or printed on any
printer.
(from turing.abs)
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