Turing Machine Simulator

This is a simple attempt to replicate the (awesome) work done in the online Turing machine simulator at turingmachinesimulator.com in C++ so it is faster to test big machines. I don't claim it ot be bug-free, feature complete, well written nor the fastest possible implementation but it serves its purpose decently well.

Building

make

Usage

In the examples directory there are some nice algorithms implemented for the online simulator that can be used to to test this simulator (some were copied verbatim from the online simulator examples, others were written by me). The basic syntax is as follows

./turing <tm_code> <input_string>

If you want to simulate the machine without input you can use _ as the second argument. The underscore character works as the TM blank symbol so it is equivalent.

Flags

The simulator has several flags to get more information out of the simulation, the following summary comes up when the simulator is ran without arguments.

	Usage
	turing <tm_file> <input_word>

	--show_machine [false]:
			Show a summary of the parsed TM
	--show_steps [false]:
			Show each step of the main tape of the TM excecution
	--run [true]:
			Run the TM
	--output [true]:
			Output the final content of the TM tapes
	--max_steps [10000000]:
			Maximum number of steps
	--limit [true]:
			Limit number of steps
	--json [false]:
    		Outputs the result in a JSON format (overrides --output)

Examples

Try running the following commands to see the simulator working

# 5-state busy beaver machine. It will run for a while
./turing examples/bb5.tm _ --nolimit --nooutput

# Decimal to binary converter. This will only show the machine
./turing examples/dec2bin.tm --show_machine --norun

# Duplicate binary string with single tape
./turing examples/dup_bin_string.tm 101 --show_steps

# Sort a list of binary numbers
./turing examples/list_sort.tm 0101#0011#0110#0111#0011#1000