Turing Machine Simulator
Every computer, from your phone to a supercomputer, can be reduced to this: a tape of symbols, a head that reads and writes one cell at a time, and a small table of rules. This simulator animates classic machines — a binary incrementer, a unary adder, a palindrome checker and the famous 3-state busy beaver — with the tape scrolling, the head hopping, and the current rule highlighted in the program table at every step. Slow it down to follow the logic or crank the speed and let it run.
Runs 100% in your browser — simulations are computed locally on your device.
Read the full guide to this tool
Notes
- A Turing machine is defined by a finite table: (state, symbol) → (write, move, next state).
- The 3-state busy beaver writes six 1s in 14 steps — the maximum possible before halting.
- Church–Turing thesis: anything effectively computable can be computed by such a machine.
- Runs 100% in your browser — simulations are computed locally on your device.
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