Replying to @⁨ki4jgt@feddit.org⁩

This is actually something that a turing machine is suitable for.

Get youself something to remember what state you’re in, write the rules on a sheet of paper and use a stack of paper as the tape, with each piece of paper being one cell.

Turing’s idea was to build a mathematical model that mirrored how humans go about large, complex tasks.

Honestly, all of these super basic mathematical models for calculation are fairly well suited to being “run” by hand.

Random-access-machines can be done similarly to turing machines. Write the program down, keep the program counter on one piece of paper, and have a (numbered) stack of paper as memory.

And lambda-calculus is probably the easiest. Just write out the expression, and then write out each reduction step. This is what functional programming languages build on, and with the additional effort of checking types, you could probabl evaluate something like Haskell by hand pretty well.

All of those are turing complete (if you ignore infinite memory).

EDIT: spelling

Replying to @⁨AntiOutsideAktion@lemmy.ml⁩

This comment deserves more love.

The word “computer” predates what most people think of as a computer by centuries. It was originally a job title, people were called computers because that’s what they did compute. They would follow the instructions given to them by hand and then give the results to their supervisor.

It also wasn’t seen as an intellectual role and they were sometimes not appreciated as much as they should have been. A good example is how the women in the computing departments at NASA were treated, especially those that were also segregated because of their colour.