Turing Machine

We went to a talk this evening by Marc Raynaud. There was a 20 minute video about the short, brilliant but ultimately tragic life of Alan Turing and then the actual talk about how Marc has built a working Turing machine and how he uses it to teach computational theory. At the end of the talk before the discussion he fed a simple program into his computer (punched card) and then it carried out a simple calculation. One of the extras is the backplane where the paper program is loaded, and the second extra just a nice close up or an edge connector from a relatively modern piece of IT kit - unrelated to the talk.

Because I know the story of Turing, his contribution to cryptanalysis that saved millions of lives in the second world war, his theoretical contributions to modern computers, and his tragic end I was able to fill in the blanks from the talk (in French) where I wasn't able to keep up with what was said all the time.

After the talk people were able to go on stage an look at the machine, it was a bit crowded to get a good picture, so they are as good as it gets...

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