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Working Turing Machine

ideas.lego.com

259 pointsludovicianul33 comments

It works fine, but I don't want to be turning that lever by hand forever - have they made sure that it halts at some point?

EDIT1:

"Won't there be a problem with Intellectual Property? No, the Turing machine is a mathematical model and has no Intellectual Property :)"

I love this kind of comment.

No; https://www.jstor.org/stable/2371045?origin=crossref

Whoosh! It was a joke.

Yes; Turing Machine with finite tape can be simulated by a deterministic finite automaton, and we know if those halt or not.

If it supported an infinite tape, that would get me closer to my dream of owning an infinite number of legos!

I love it!

> Yes;

The question was "have they made sure that it halts at some point?"

The answer cannot be yes, since some machines never halt.

OT: I find it interesting that the Technic branch of Lego seems to increasingly separate itself from the rest of the franchise, design-wise - to the point they got rid of the actual bricks!

In older models, there used to be the occasional "flying" section that was built exclusively out of axles, beams and linkages, but the main support structures were still mostly made out of "traditional" Lego bricks (albeit with holes in them).

With recent models, they seem to have made the "flying" style the norm and the standard bricks the exception.

I wonder if this is some indication of Technic becoming its own thing independent of Lego.

(I only noticed the design changes, I have no idea if there are some company politics behind it - but if there is more information I'd be interested to know)

...apparently the community term is "studless" and the design change already occurred in the late 90s or early 00s!

I feel old now.

https://bricks.stackexchange.com/questions/1912/why-does-leg...

A small size version of Rubens !

http://rubens.ens-lyon.fr/fr/videos/

Indeed they improved the tape cell size by an order of magnitude, to be about the minimum possible.

One concern: Given the complexity, I wonder if this might be too niche for a mainstream LEGO release. Maybe it would work better as a specialized educational set?

This feel like a model which should benefit when the limit for LEGO ideas is increased from 3000 to 5000 pieces.

https://brickset.com/article/113876/lego-ideas-maximum-part-...

Can't wait to see DOOM running on this one!

You’ll have to wait (and crank) quite a bit for the first frame to be output though.

Just build it in Roblox and let it run by itself!

Boy, that’s some “Towers of Hanoi” business, isn’t it? Imagine a monastic group dedicated to this. “Our goal is to use the Lego Turing Machine to render all frames from John Romero’s speedrun of Doom level 1. And then the universe will end.”

I just realized, that's accelerationism with less steps

Built a working implementation in Go [0] a while ago, have always wanted to hook up DOOM to it.

[0] https://github.com/planetlambert/turing

When I was a child, the dream build was the programmable crane from the 8888 Lego Ideas book.

https://rebrickable.com/blog/685/classic-review-technic-idea...

Alas, I did not have enough gear racks to program it.

Thanks to bricklink I eventually got my revenge when I got my own kids.

In general a fantastic book.

I loved reading this! Brought back a lot of memories. Thanks for posting.

I remember getting help from my grandfather sending a mail to Denmark complaining that the rubber bands in some model broke, and they were not easily replaceable with regular rubber bands.

So I got a reply back with some new rubber bands along with this book.

The excavator on the front page was possible to build with my bricks and also a good build.

(probably explained somewhere but I didn't see it) Is all the logic done with Lego gears!?

Looks like it (as well as Lego bricks, pins etc.). Apparently Lego is Turing-complete.

That's a bit like saying wood is turing-complete.

Is that a 3D printed Lego gear at 12'40" in the video?

Can you post a screenshot? I don't see anything, but I don't think that player let's me find the correct location either...

In front of the middle finger: http://herrdebby.netsec.be/3d_lego_Screenshot_2024-09-26_14-...

Looks like a 3-d printed 40 teeth gear.

https://sariel.pl/2009/09/gears-tutorial/

Yeah, that looks 3D-printed. I wonder though why he would 3D print a standard part that is also easily obtainable online. (Unless he had a printer already available and it was easier to print it than to buy one)

From the Register article:

"Fans of 3D printing will no doubt be pleased to note that some of the parts (notably one of the large gears) came from a printer, but only because buying missing bits online tends to take longer and cost more. A real-world version of the model was designed and built first to make sure it worked. Stud.io was then pressed into service to create rendered versions."

https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/05/lego_ideas_turing_mac...

Does it come with UTM on the tape?

Meh. Wake me up when it's done booting Linux.

(Joke)

This is awesome!

RIP.

Thank god addressable memory.

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