A Turing Machine Built With Lego, And a Place To Put It

New submitter Otis_INF writes "To honor Alan Turing, two researchers at the CWI built a simple LEGO Turing Machine, to show everyone how simple a computer actually is. Primary goals were to make every operation as visible as possible and to make it using just a single LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT set." And if a simple Turing machine gets old, Reader miller60 adds a link to this Lego data center "that recreates all the major features of an IT facility, assembled from 5,772 pieces, 28 figures, and 1 meter of fiber optic cable. The builder, Tanaka, has uploaded details to the Lego Digital Designer Gallery so others can build and adapt their own."

It's an LBA, not a TM

[Prune]

At Turing machine has infinite tape (memory). You cannot build one in the real world**. This is a deterministic LBA (linearly bounded automaton). **for two reasons preventing infinite storage: 1. a real world automaton is limited in extent by its light cone, and you cannot rely on this growing forever since accelerating expansion of the universe eventually will prevent outer parts of the device from communicating back with lightspeed signals 2. the Bekenstein bound limits information density: you can only store a finite information in a finite space--so no arbitrary precision real numbers