What is a Turing Machine? The Simple Theory Behind Every Computer
In 1936, a 23-year-old mathematician named Alan Turing drew an imaginary machine on paper to win an argument with logicians. Eight states. Twenty rules. A strip of paper. That sketch turned out to define what every computer can do — and the walls no computer will ever break. We walk through the machine itself, watch it recognize a palindrome step by step, and see why your laptop, ChatGPT, and Magic: The Gathering all live inside the same 90-year-old idea.