Building a Turing Machine emulator to explore Turing’s great ideas

Turing’s classic 1936 paper launched the field of Computer Science by introducing the Turing Machine model of computation. The popular retelling of Turing’s work focuses on the halting problem but Turing prefer his machines to never halt. His demonstration of a universal turing machine showed that software can be separated from hardware and paved the way for the stored-program computer.

In this talk, we will develop our own Turing Machine emulator and execute some of Turing’s machines and show how his ideas shaped our understanding of Programming and Computer Science.