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When Pac-Man Met Turing > The Game Runs on an Emulated 6502 CPU
- Source :
- IEEE Spectrum; 2023, Vol. 60 Issue: 6 p16-18, 3p
- Publication Year :
- 2023
-
Abstract
- As I read the newest papers about DNA-based computing, I had to confront a rather unpleasant truth. Despite being a geneticist who also majored in computer science, I was struggling to bridge two concepts—the universal Turing machine, the very essence of computing, and the von Neumann architecture, the basis of most modern CPUs. I had written C++ code to emulate the machine described in Turing's 1936 paper, and could use it to decide, say, if a word was a palindrome. But I couldn't see how such a machine—with its one-dimensional tape memory and ability to look at only one symbol on that tape at a time-could behave like a billion-transistor processor with hardware features such as an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), program counter, and instruction register.
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00189235
- Volume :
- 60
- Issue :
- 6
- Database :
- Supplemental Index
- Journal :
- IEEE Spectrum
- Publication Type :
- Periodical
- Accession number :
- ejs63271597
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2023.10147078