S2E03 - Turing Machine (Computation)

#Computation #TuringMachine #AlanTuring #Logic #DeductionGames #BoardGames #Science #Math #STEM Summary Today we cover Turing Machine, a pure logic and deduction game where you use punchcards to identify the hidden code. We're joined by the inestimable Stephen Granade, grand high guru of the DragonCon Science Track, to help us understand who Alan Turing was, what a computer is, and how its logic works, plus cool facts about lasers and stuff.  Timestamps 0:00 - Introduction 2:11 - Laser cooling, plate tectonics, and DNA data storage 9:39 - Turing Machine game overview 18:37 - The magic behind the punchcards 23:15 - Who was Alan Turing and his machine? 32:54 - Data storage and punchcards 40:59 - Boolean math & quantum computing 46:06 - Nitpicks and final grades 54:38 - Final thoughts Links Official Game Site (TuringMachine.info) DNA for data storage (Harvard Magazine) Laser cooling (Wikipedia) Homologous recombination (Wikipedia) Fully synthetic genome (J Craig Venter Institute) Episode on Evolution  Turing Machine Designer Diary (Board Game Geek) How Dobble/Spot It works (Youtube) Running Minecraft as a computer Running Magic the Gathering as a computer Half-adder algorithm (Youtube) (note: still quite technical) Science vs Movies at Dragoncon video 1 and video 2 (Youtube) Gettysburg game (Board Game Geek)   Other stuff Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/  ) Stephen  0:00  Music. Brian  0:06  Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:11  Today, we'll be talking about Turing Machine by Scorpion Masque. All right. Welcome back. Everyone to gaming with science. This is Jason. This is Brian. And today we have very special guest Stephen Granade. Stephen we know from science track at Dragon Con, which I think people have heard us talk about before. He is the lead guru and ring master of the science track, and manages to keep all the things running and fight for our space and make sure we have the resources we need. So we are very grateful to him.  Brian  0:41  The Grand Poobah. Stephen  0:42  You make me sound so organized. Jason  0:45  All you need is the illusion of organization, and you're fine.  Stephen  0:49  That's right,  Jason  0:49  anyway. But if you can kind of introduce yourself to the guest, what's your background? What's your what's your story? Stephen  0:54  So my background is that I spent my undergraduate years at a small liberal arts college as a member of the major of the Month Club. But as my chemistry professor said, I never dropped any of the majors. So after cramming four years into five, I had a Bachelor of Science, dual major, physics, chemistry, and then a bachelor of arts, theater arts, with a math minor. And I looked around at the options there and decided, you know, where the real business is. That's physics. Why I went to graduate school in physics. I studied atomic cooling and trapping, where we would use lasers to cool down atoms to ultra cold temperatures to the point where they started to act in concert. And you would get a basically a quantum super fluid, if you've ever heard of like liquid helium, where you cool it down enough that it doesn't have friction or things like that. We were doing that, but with dilute gasses of atoms. So also, again, just a great career decision. Lots of people wanting to cool atoms down a lot, but fortunately, it also involved lasers and optics. So I moved into working for companies doing sensors and image processing, which of course, turned into machine learning. So I just have this mishmash of