Aim of the experiment

The concept of a Turing Machine is central to the idea of generalised sequential computation. In the hierarchy of computational machines, we shall soon see that there are computational tasks that Pushdown Automata cannot perform but Turing machines can. Similar to DFA vs NFA, we shall first understand the notion of a Deterministic Turing Machine and then we shall see the non-deterministic version of the same.

The concept of a turing machine is usually perceived to be difficult to understand by students, possibly due to the involved mathematical definition. A virtual experiment has the benefit of clearly showing the running of a turing machine on a string written on a tape. Depending on the final state of the ‘head’ and the configuration of the tape, the learner can infer whether the given string is accepted by the given turing machine.