Ontario-based Michael Gardi is one such maker who has now created two versions of his Turing Machine Demonstrator (TMD). Acknowledging that there are some other great implementations out there, he wanted to maintain a focus on the real purpose of a Turing machine. “In my humble opinion, the complexity of these excellent and imaginative solutions often detracted from the understanding of what a Turing machine actually does,” he tells us. “For TMD-1, my goal was to demonstrate the idea of a Turing machine with as much clarity as possible. I wanted to build a machine that was simple to program and easy to understand. I was really happy with the way that TMD-1 turned out. I believe it met the stated goals of ‘simple to program’ and ‘easy to understand’. To help accomplish those goals, the machine itself was limited to three states / three symbols,…