Cellular Automaton Model for Turing Tumble Mechanical Computer

Abstract

This paper presents a cellular automaton-based model for a mechanical computer called 'Turing Tumble' computer. This computer uses mechanical reactions of a ball flowing down and mechanical components (such as gear and ramp) that are configured on the board, for its computation. A group of cells, called a supercell, is defined in the proposed model in order to represent simultaneous state transition of cells for implementing a chain reaction of connected gears. A small element with its memory called Converter is shown for an illustrative example on this model.