A physical implementation of the Turing machine accessed through Web

Abstract

A Turing machine has an important role in education in the field of computer science, as it is a milestone in courses related to automata theory, theory of computation and computer architecture. Its value is also recognized in the Computing Curricula proposed by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society. In this paper we present a physical implementation of the Turing machine accessed through Web. To enable remote access to the Turing machine, an implementation of the client-server architecture is built. The web interface is described in detail and illustrations of remote programming, initialization and the computation of the Turing machine are given. Advantages of such approach and expected benefits obtained by using remotely accessible physical implementation of the Turing machine as an educational tool in the teaching process are discussed.