Page 33 - নব আনান্দে জাগো

Turing Machine

Madhurima Ghosh

ু
দলেনত বনসদিলাি একটা Technical Article Turing Machine দেনয়, দকন্তু ইজঞ্জদ েয়ার কাক আর
দপদসনির িযাগাজজনে কস্পম্পউটার সাইন্স বা ইনলকট্রদেক্স দবেয়ক দকি ু খলো Grand Viva খিওয়ার
িনতাই কষ্টিে ! িুরু িুরু বনি দলনেই খফললাি।

Jokes apart, let us get straight to the point. What is a Turing Machine? Why is it known as
the foundation of Computer Science? Instead of stating formal definitions, I will try to

explain it in Layman's words.
In the early 20th century, mathematicians came up with a question whether just following

certain rules or an algorithm and not any intuition and gut feeling could solve a
mathematical problem. It is similar to cooking some food item only by referring to the
recipe. You have no option to improvise the dish or even add a pinch of salt by tasting it, or
checking its aroma or colour. Alan Turing tried to answer this question and came up with his

notion of Turing machine in 1936.
It is a hypothetical machine, which can solve any problem; no matter how complicated it is,

if given enough time and memory space.

All of us already know that electronic machines can have only two input or output states -
high voltage (1) and low voltage (0). So, the language that can be understood by any
machine should be written only using 0s and 1s.

A typical Turing machine consists of an infinitely long imaginary tape consisting of blocks or
squares in it. The squares either can have the alphabets - 0 and 1 or can be kept blank. In
modern day computers, the memory or the storage devices are equivalent to the tape of

Turing machine. In addition, a Head is freely movable over the tape. For easy understanding,
you can consider the tape as the railway track and the head as a train engine, which moves
over track. However, this engine has a special capability to read, write and modify the
contents of the track.

নব আনন্দে জান্দ া 27 2020