A group of students at the computer science department at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon built a working replica of a Turing Machine out of Lego bricks, with 20,000 elements used including 32 pneumatic cylinders, 50 meters of pneumatic tubing, and over a thousand gears!

Turing machines consist of a tape, a head that reads and writes symbols on the tape, a state register that stores the current status of the machine, as well as an “action table” that stores processes for writing and erasing symbols in the table. Now imagine doing that all with Lego…



[via Trammell Hudson]