Monday, March 25, 2019

If you could give Turing machines one bonus feature, what would it be?

I like to give students the opportunity to be creative. Partially this is because I am noble and committed to good pedagogy practices and all that; partly it is for my own amusement. (Students had to create Twitter bots for my amusement, too --- you can see them here, Twitter login required.)

If you could give Turing machines one bonus feature, what would it be?

Some people were practical:

  • I would add a more streamlined ability to count.
  • Ctrl-F find value
  • Writing proofs for me.
  • remember marked spot (instead of needing to mark)
  • Its head can go to any position on the tape instantly without having to step through the middle steps.
  • to be able to jump to a location in the tape not right next to where the head is

Others were silly:
  • snack dispenser
  • a cool spoiler (illustration below)
  • funny hats (illustration below)
  • dance a jig


Some were infeasible:
  • Always halt for every problem. [editor's note: provably impossible, you impertinent youth!]

And some were downright haunting:
  • Express feelings. It would be nice to know how TM feels when in runs forever. Would it be sad? happy? bored? [editor's note: how would the TM know it is running forever? it could just be churning and doing real computation...]
  • consciousness

By far the one that struck the deepest chord and has followed me, hounding me into my dreams, was: "teeth." Yikes.


This post's theme word is stenophagous (adj), "feeding on a limited variety of food." The zookeeper found the dietary needs of TMs a challenge; they were among the most stenophagous charges at the mathematical-hypothetical petting zoo.

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