BBC Relativity

I have been reading some of the pages about Alan Turing especially the bits about Turing Machines, not something which I have ever really been awareof, though in my line of work I have the horrible feeling I should have been. Maybe I was asleep during the lecture. I had this sudden idea of running many simulations on a PC, all interlinked and resulting in a machine by default which would pass the Turing Test though as far as I know, the only thing that the Turing machine and the Turing Test have in common is their inventor. I will find out soon enough as I have at last started the Alan Turing Biography. This seems very like the idea of putting the image of a Prayer written in Tibetan as a bitmap file on the harddisk of your PC which in effect turns it into a Prayer wheel. I don't think that the processing behind a Turing machine is very extensive; it is the range of the data on the tape which defines the complexity which the machine can handle. I also didn't realise that you could actually get the TM to output anything other 1 or 0. The Palindrome detector in the online applet at the site above actually prints out YES or NO on the tape. How about a Turing machine in which each entry on the tape is the result of a run of another Turing Machine. That defeats the object because a Turing machine is theoretically more powerful than any existing computer. It could be programmed to carry out any task though it would take huge amounts of state coding to do it and lots of time to reach the HALT state. Maybe if we could get one to work at atomic or Quantum level, it would be really useful. It's all a bit like the opening chapter in Godel, Escher, Bach with the Theorem to be proved or disproved but that maybe just because both this and the Turing Machine have a linear sequence and the end is a defined halt state.