Denis Cousineau: Lego Turing Machine

From BoingBoing: Denis Cousineau has achieved the exceptional. He has constructed a Turing Machine using only Lego bricks and a Lego Mindstorms RCX processor. Although a bit large and unwieldy, the brick-based construction is able to carry out instructions and perform calculations.

Denis gives a description of how he built the machine, including code for the RCX processor. Lego enthusiasts should also check out his other pages, featuring some funny robots.

The Turing Machine was invented by Alan Turing in 1936 as a theoretical model of a universal computational machine, anticipating modern computers by many decades. Turing famously worked on the British team of code crackers that decrypted the German Enigma code, giving the Allies a major intelligence advantage. The Enigma machine is arguably the direct ancestor of modern computers.

Turing is also considered the father of artificial intelligence because of his 1950 paper "Computing machinery and intelligence", where he proposes that the brain is a computational engine. Wired Magazine has an amusing account of a practical experiment with a version of the well-known standard Turing Test. Instead of simply trying to identify a computer as human or machine, the test subject must be able to tell if the person she is chatting with is female or not.