"(Th)ink Machine"
featuring Aaron Fenyes

Video

Project software and handout

Contest software and handout

On March 30, 2014, graduate student Aaron Fenyes led an activity about a kind of computer most of us hadn't seen before: one that thinks in strings of text instead of stacks of numbers. Figuring that the best way to learn about these strange-looking machines was to build some ourselves, we ditched the lecture hall and headed upstairs to the math department computer lab.

Our text-processing machines turned out to be simple enough that we could figure out how they worked just by watching them run. Once we got the hang of them, we designed, built, and tested machines that did lots of different mathematical tasks—not to mention plenty that just made colorful patterns and silly beeps.

Many of us accidentally discovered that it's easy to build a machine that will run forever without stopping. It was much harder to build a machine that would run for a long time, but still eventually stop! We ended with a contest to find the machine that could run the longest before stopping.

Printable version of the flyer