This is a Turing machine visualizer designed for learning through visual thinking and creative exploration.
There are two ways to interact with this editor - the first is through intuitive mouse interaction, and the second involves using less-intuitive code
When encoded, machines are described in a simple YAML-based format. As you code, each save updates the state diagram; this offers the speed and directness of code, combined with the visual intuitiveness of a graphical editor.
Multiple example machines are provided, each one with commentary that touches on concepts like subroutines and inductive definitions / recursion. Many examples include exercises that build on the machines and deepen understanding. To encourage experimentation, the document system provides for quick snapshots and auto-saving to browser local storage.
The author is hugely thankful for the turingmachine.io code which this is built on top of.
If you want to work on the site itself, here’s how to get started:
Clone the repo and run npm install in the folder. Afterwards, use npm start to host the site locally on a webpack server, by default at localhost:8080.
If you just want to see the site in action and play around with turing machines, the site is currently hosted here.
Thanks go to the authors of the following runtime dependencies:
- Ace code editor
- bluebird.js cancellable promises
- Bootstrap with the lumen theme
- clipboard.js one-click copy to clipboard
- D3 visualization and DOM manipulation library
- jQuery
- js-yaml parser & serializer
- lodash and lodash/fp utilities