# GNOME Turing Machine simulator user guide.

Copyright © 1998, 2000 by Free Software Foundation

# Introduction

A very simple Turing Machine simulator. Turing machine was introduced by British mathematician Alan Turing in 1936 as a formalization of the notion of an "algorithm". It is the simplest possible computing device which can only perform very simple operations. However, it can be shown that Turing machine is every bit as powerful as any of the modern programming languages: every algorithm that can be implemented in, say, Java, can also be written as a program for the Turing Machine. Of course, no one uses the Turing machine for actual computing work, but it is very useful in theoretical computer science and mathematical logic, not to mention that it is a nice toy to play with.

GNOME Turing machine simulator provides graphical interface for resetting, stopping, running and stepping the machine. It also contains a states viewer which allows you to to see, and even debug, the currently running program. Finally, GNOME Turing machine simulator comes with a number of sample "programs"; the program file format is described in the section called Program File Format so that you can write your own programs. Please send any programs you produce to Arturo Espinosa (`<arturo@nuclecu.unam.mx>`) so that they are included in the next release.

To run gturing, select Games->gturing from the Main Menu, or type gturing on the command line.

gturing is included in the `gnome-games` package, which is part of the GNOME desktop environment. This document describes version 1.2 of gturing.

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