New goal: Universal Turing Machine in HDL

[John Rohde Jensen]

I've done all the regular HW projects in the book and that's excellent etc. But, last
night, I watched a lecture on Alan Turing and Turing Machines. That got me thinking.

It would be really cool to use the TECS hardware simulation system to implement:
- Finite-state machine
- Pushdown automaton
- Turing machine
- Universal Turing machine(UTM)

I know that an UTM is a horrible way to build a computer and that the computer, build
in TECS, is Turing complete but that's beside the point ;-)

The idea is to make these theoretical constructs more real, for the student, by actually
implementing them.

Questions:
- Have anybody done something along these lines?
- Is it possible within the constrains of the hardware simulator?

[cadet1620]

Very interesting idea! I think it would be possible to create a Turing Machine in HDL, but I haven't heard of anybody trying.

I was planning to sleep tonight, but you may have ruined that for me 8^)

You might be interested in The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine, by Charles Petzold.

--Mark