This is very cool - today only, Google's "doodle" on their main search page is a cool visualization of a Turing Machine, in honor of Alan Turing's hundredth birthday.
You should go to https://www.google.com/ and try it out. There is no user manual - it is a brain teaser. It's not actually all that difficult, because it trains you step by step in what the symbols mean - you just have to be willing to experiment a little at the beginning. If you need a little help, I'll say a little more at the end of this post.
Alan Turing was a great mathematician and computer scientist. Among other things, he played a major role in helping the Allies secretly break the Nazi enigma code during World War II, which provided Brittan and the US with critical intelligence. He also played a major role in inventing the theory of modern computers, all of which are equivalent to the "Turing Machine" he invented. By "equivalent", we mean that today's computers may run faster with modern electronics, and may be connected to fancy devices like color screens and mice, but in terms of what sorts of problems they can calculate solutions for, they are identical.
The "Turing Machine" implements all the basic capabilities of any modern computer, specifically the ability to execute a stored program that can branch and loop. As visualized in the Google doodle, it has an infinite "magnetic tape" (like memory or disk in a modern computer). It is limited to "addressing" the tape at one particular spot (the central "read/write" head), so to access an arbitrary position on the tape, the program must execute commands that wind it forward or backward one square at a time.
In the Google doodle, the program is represented by symbols, some of which you can click on to modify the program so it does something else. Clicking the Run button runs the program, which modifies the initial configuration of the tape (consisting of zeros and ones, and blanks) into some other configuration. The goal is to make the tape show the same pattern of zeros and ones as in the goal window; if you do, the "G" in Google will light up, and the machine will reset with a new goal and a more complex programming challenge. Solving that makes the "o" light up, and after a couple minutes you can get the whole word "Google" to light up. You should try it - it is a lot of fun trying to figure out what the symbols mean. When you press run, it animates the running of the program so you can see what the symbols do and follow the logic. Then you can modify the program and try again. You don't "lose" anything by making mistakes, so feel free to experiment to learn.
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