Turing Machine Programming/Puzzle

order and tape are given, then player is supposed to make a program, which consists of 10 commands and makes the given tape the same as order.

Each of order and tape is a list of 10 bits (0 or 1).

The turing machine has head and state:

• head points to somewhere at the tape
• state is one of the followings: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, A, and E.

The situation can be described as a table:

<s c c' d s'> means: When the state is s and the character at the head is c, then change the character as c', move to d direction (R for right, L for left), and set the state s'.

For example, if the situation is:

then the command starting with <2, 0, is executed.

If the command is <2, 0, 1, R, 3>, the next situation will be:

A program consists of 10 commands, as follows:

<0, 0, 0, R, 1> <0, 1, 1, R, 0>
<1, 0, 1, R, 1> <1, 1, 0, R, 2>
<2, 0, 0, R, 3> <2, 1, 1, R, 2>
<3, 0, 1, R, 3> <3, 1, 0, L, 4>
<4, 0, 0, R, 4> <4, 1, 0, L, A>

Player can edit c', d, s' (last three parts) of each command <s, c, c', d, s'>.

• c' can be 0 or 1
• d can be R or L
• s' can be 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or A

This program solves the problem above. Try tracing it.

At the beginning, the machine's state is 0, and head points the first bit of tape. Then commands are repeatedly executed.

head may go outside (left or right) of the tape, then the machine stops at the state E. This is OK and often used for tricky programs.

If the state becomes A, then the machine stops.

Infinite loops are not accepted or detected. HALT button will rescue you in that case.

| order | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| -     | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| tape  | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| head  | ↑ |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
| state | 0 |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |

<0, 0, 0, R, 0> <0, 1, 1, R, 0>
<1, 0, 0, R, 1> <1, 1, 1, R, 1>
<2, 0, 0, R, 2> <2, 1, 1, R, 2>
<3, 0, 0, R, 3> <3, 1, 1, R, 3>
<4, 0, 0, R, 4> <4, 1, 1, R, 4>