I received a link to a fascinating site (http://www.aturingmachine.com) and video of a working model of a Turing Machine (TM). Turing Machines are named for British mathematician Alan Turing after a 1936 paper where he proposes a computing machine. The machine is a finite state automaton, being a area of study of the fundamental aspects of theoretical Computer Science.
While Turing Machines can be described, they can’t (as yet) be constructed, as one requirement is a memory tape of infinite length. Long ago during an exam in fundamentals of systems computing I had to emulate a Turing state machine on step-by-step on paper.
Mike Davey constructed the elaborate demonstration Turing Machine you see on these videos.
This brings us to the attendant Bilski decision on patentability of business methods and transformation tests. So many questions arise with the TM: would a TM have been patentable? What do these videos illustrate about computability? This is somewhat an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ problem.