[HN Gopher] Turing Complete is a game about computer science
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Turing Complete is a game about computer science
Author : thunderbong
Score : 272 points
Date : 2024-01-09 12:22 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (turingcomplete.game)
(TXT) w3m dump (turingcomplete.game)
| oaiey wrote:
| Side Note: Bought the Turing Machine board game (different than
| this here) last week. A game basically about debugging. Awesome
| game!!!
| cybrox wrote:
| We have actually been using this at work and I can highly
| recommend it!
|
| I have played through it together with my colleague in my free
| time about a year ago and we really liked it. We figured it would
| be the perfect fit for our electrical engineering apprentices,
| since they do learn all concepts of digital logic such as gates,
| registers, shift registers, counters, etc. during their
| educational journey but they rarely ever put a lot of it into a
| practical project. Also, a lot of derived things such as assembly
| programming are simply not taught anymore in the interest of
| time.
|
| With some additional outside guidance, this game can really help
| people understand the working of digital logic components and
| motivate them to play around with them. The fact that you can go
| all the way to writing a simple assembly language and solving
| some puzzles with it is awesome and really motivated them.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| https://turingcomplete.game/blog
|
| Last blog update was March 2022 so it doesn't look too lively.
| naikrovek wrote:
| Don't let that fool you. The game is very mature and a large
| update is in progress.
|
| The steam store page has newer updates, latest being August
| 2023, I believe.
| pdpi wrote:
| According to the folks on discord, the dev is busy redoing the
| base simulator logic, in preparation for some bigger changes.
|
| At any rate, the game as-is today is a worthwhile purchase.
| People have built e.g. whole RISC-V CPUs in it, and you can
| interact with disk and/or network if you want, so it's pretty
| flexible.
| SamBam wrote:
| Not sure that games need to be in continuous development.
| Sometimes they can just be done.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| I would say for an early access-game, this is a legit fear.
| Early Access on Steam is like alpha or beta-status, meaning
| it's officially unfinished.
|
| Though, a blog with just three articles, instead of the
| actual shop-site or other official channels, seems not the
| most reliable source.
| octobus2021 wrote:
| The game has been basically complete for more than a year,
| going through the levels will teach you more than college-level
| micro-controller architecture class does.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Some others have commented some of this but I wanted to provide
| some links to the resources as well. The last update was 6
| months ago on the game's Steam news page
| https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/1444480/announcements/detail/...
| and YouTube https://youtu.be/38cKko7sViw
|
| In terms of feature updates the last major feature update was
| in September 2022 https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/1444480/announ
| cements/detail/.... The game also has an active Discord
| https://discord.gg/hdrJaMUdrF for those wanting to follow along
| in more detail.
| xavdid wrote:
| Last steam update was posted Aug 2023 which says "patch is
| coming soon!" so it seems like work is happening, just in the
| background.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1444480/view/3676677...
| chewmieser wrote:
| Similar game: https://nandgame.com/
|
| Although Turing Complete does appear to have more depth than nand
| game.
| madsbuch wrote:
| Theoretical CS pun intended?
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| I never got what's the difference between this game and (free,
| in-browser) NAND-to-Tetris
| cybrox wrote:
| This makes it sound like this is a mystery that has eluded
| humankind for years. :D
|
| Personally, I would say NAND-to-Tetris is a (great) freely
| available learning resource for people looking to actively
| learn more about computers and digital logic from the ground
| up. It is mostly structured like a course you would take and
| the game it leads up to is a means to an end.
|
| Turing complete on the other hand is a more playful approach
| that guides you through the individual steps (though it still
| requires you to look up quite a lot of things on your own) with
| a little story and provides more smaller challenges instead of
| just one big end goal. In addition to that, it features a
| relatively powerful sandbox that allows you to interact with
| things and there's a scoring system for complexity and runtime
| for all your little solutions that gives it a small competitive
| side.
|
| I wouldn't say one is better than the other. NAND-to-Tetris is
| a learning resource with a game in it and Turing Complete is a
| game with learning resources and a sandbox in it.
| ykonstant wrote:
| I am a little confused; is NAND-to-tetris free? I thought you
| had to buy the course, or something like that.
| SilasX wrote:
| I highlighted a few differences recently:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38740170
|
| To which I would add, TC is more newbie friendly, what with the
| cartoonish GUI, while Nand2tetris expects that you're already
| more technically adept and capable of working at the level of
| command-line.
| thrillgore wrote:
| Also of interest is Exapunks
| (https://www.zachtronics.com/exapunks/), which did a better job
| teaching me asm than my college course did.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| TIS-100 was also excellent. It's actually harder than real asm.
| shagie wrote:
| Have you also given Shenzhen I/O a run?
| deskamess wrote:
| Is Shenzen I/O hardware or software? Or firmware?
| junon wrote:
| The game is about writing firmware for a large Chinese
| multinational. It's also pretty fun.
| shagie wrote:
| All of the above. You're placing components, running wire
| paths, writing assembly for the component.
|
| An old Scott Manley video introducing it:
| https://youtu.be/UpJU3wIf-v0
|
| It's quite featureful ... https://youtu.be/2tlW3S4V29Y and
| https://youtu.be/BGLWE6S68b0
| octobus2021 wrote:
| I gave it a try quite a few years ago. I had a mixed feeling.
| On one hand, it is a great simulation of actual
| hardware/firmware dev jobs. On another hand I wasn't sure who
| the target audience was. If you're doing this for a living
| you probably don't want to do that as part of a game too, and
| if you aren't, you probably will find it too dry and detailed
| because it is THAT close to a real job...
|
| I haven't gotten TIS-100 however many years it came out for
| the same reason. When I feel nostalgic I just dust off some
| old tools and do some fun stuff with C or Assembly.
|
| Turing Complete is definitely more of a game, however with a
| lot of educational value.
| OnionBlender wrote:
| Shenzhen has some restrictions and mechanics I don't like.
|
| - circuit board is too small and jumper wires are only
| vertical. - assembly lines per chip is too limited. - I don't
| like the plus/minus mechanic for conditions. - not enough
| microcontroller varients. I often wanted a microcontroller
| with 3 simple IO pins instead of the XBus pins.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I bought this game and it is a work of art. I'm a non-CS
| background developer, working for about 15 years. Much of what
| the game contains I knew "in the abstract" or had fiddled with on
| Arduino boards or little side projects or whatever. But this is
| basically THE hands on curriculum that everybody who enjoys
| mucking with computers craves.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| We're cut from the same cloth, so I'm excited to try this one
| out (when it's done).
| junon wrote:
| It's ready now, the updates to come are mostly performance
| improvements. Try it out and see what you think!
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Alright! the "preview access" flag worried me a bit, but
| I'll just jump in then!
| maltalex wrote:
| Funny, I just bought it during the Steam winter sale. It's a cool
| concept, but it definitely needs a lot more polish to be a
| genuine game or even a standalone teaching tool.
|
| It just throws these problems at you with little guidance,
| teaching, or preparation. It's fine for someone with relevant
| knowledge. But, to a beginner I feel like it would be a mostly
| frustrating experience.
|
| Also, it could benefit from providing some help with laying out
| the circuits. Moving or rotating components disconnects them from
| their tracks which you have to draw manually one at a time. So,
| once you figured out the right logic, there's a decent amount of
| friction to implement it.
| zamadatix wrote:
| One of the first few levels has a tip about double clicking a
| component to move the component and its connected wires at the
| same time (double clicking automatically selects the attached
| wire nodes as well as the component). It could use a bit more
| polish in the UI department though.
| freedomben wrote:
| How much was it? Wondering if I should wait for the spring sale
| maltalex wrote:
| It was 30% off.
| dahart wrote:
| I felt like this game was easily comparable to a semester of
| computer engineering foundation, but more fun, especially with
| the assembly minigames.
|
| In college I remember assignments to design specific instructions
| for a hypothetical CPU, and separately to design specific
| circuits, but it was never a complete or functional design. TC
| was fun because you make up your own ISA while building a
| complete miniature CPU, and you can take it as far as you want.
| octobus2021 wrote:
| I'm a simple guy, I see Turing Complete mentioned on HN, I leave
| a favorable comment :)
|
| Bought it couple years ago and went through a few levels, then
| had my (then) 14-yo son go through it during the summer break,
| with my occasional help. In the last level he wrote a program (in
| the pseudo-Assembly language that the game taught him how to
| create) to have the computer (that he built in the game starting
| from the logical gates) walk through a randomly generated maze
| (he used the keep-to-the-right logic). This game ROCKS. My only
| complaint is that nothing even remotely similar was available
| when I was his age :(
|
| I keep getting stuck on the level where memory is introduced, my
| brain doesn't seem to grasp the concept of "next/previous tick"
| very well but plenty of people post hints and even full solutions
| online so you always have an option to cheat and enter the
| solution to go to the next level.
|
| The game was basically complete more than a year ago, the author
| has been working on fully rebuilding it , to improve performance
| and be able to build more complex CPUs etc. I'm hoping he doesn't
| break anything when he pushes the update.
|
| HIGHLY recommend.
| abetusk wrote:
| I would think that Rocky's Boots (1982) [0] was a game that was
| similar to this no?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky%27s_Boots
| gwern wrote:
| Or anything in the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine genre
| really, depending how old we're talking.
| biomcgary wrote:
| I loved The Incredible Machine, but haven't found a modern
| equivalent. I can see some similarities to Factorio, but
| I'm more interested in a casual, physics based (not
| economics) game.
| paavohtl wrote:
| Contraption Maker[1] is very similar to TIM, and as it
| happens it's also by the same creator. He also released a
| large level pack of TIM-style levels just a couple of
| weeks ago.
|
| [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/241240/Contraption
| _Maker/
| mlyle wrote:
| I loved Rocky's Boots. This goes quite a bit further,
| though-- the most you'd do with Rocky's Boots is something
| like 2-3 gates + some timing related magic, where this is
| explicitly about building computers.
|
| I teach digital logic and computer architecture classes to
| middle school and high school students. I'm looking forward
| to try this. I teach students similar things, but cobbled
| together from Circuitverse, Falstad Circuit Simulator,
| Nandgame, and things I made like
| https://github.com/mlyle/armtrainer
| liendolucas wrote:
| I think many years ago I read about this one:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey and people
| liked it very much as well.
| liendolucas wrote:
| I got blocked exactly the same way you describe when designing
| the memory chips in NAND to Tetris. I eventually had to see the
| answer for that one and it turned out that I wasn't that off of
| the solution but I never understood the working syntax:
|
| What I was doing: Mux(a=out, b=in, sel=load,
| out=muxOut) DFF(in=muxOut, out=DFFOut)
|
| and last line should had been: DFF(in=muxOut,
| out=DFFOut, out=out)
|
| Nevertheless, Turing Complete seems to be the perfect companion
| to it. Wish I could independently purchase it, though it only
| seems available from Steam.
| seeknotfind wrote:
| This is an excellent game to speed run.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| When I first opened the page, I thought this was just a knockoff
| of the "Digital Logic Sim" by Sebastian Lague [1], but watching
| the video, I was impressed by how much deeper this actually went.
| So I bought it! Hopefully I get some time in the near future to
| play around with it.
|
| 1: https://sebastian.itch.io/digital-logic-sim
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| As a rule, I don't buy unfinished games (even from indie devs,
| sorry), but I promise you I will be buying this as soon as it's
| complete!
| mettamage wrote:
| Well, it is already Turing Complete.
|
| Badum, t-
|
| I'll see myself out.
|
| On a more serious note: there was another comment saying that
| the game was already complete like a year ago, and that it is
| now being rewritten for performance reasons.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The game is playable from start to finish but the ongoing
| work and roadmap includes features and functionality not
| present in the current version such as changes and additions
| to the levels as well as custom level/level sharing
| functionality. Scoring and circuit complexity are being
| modified as well. I greatly enjoy it but if one is looking
| for something that isn't going to change under their feet
| it's not quite there yet.
| Arnavion wrote:
| You're fine to have whatever rules you want of course, but
| perhaps a more useful rule would be "Does this game have enough
| content to justify its price?" regardless of its finished-ness.
| There are finished games for which that answer is "No" and
| there are unfinished games like this one for which the answer
| (IMO) is "Yes".
| daviddoran wrote:
| Bought and played this as a "non-Computer-Science" developer and
| really enjoyed it and learned from it. It helped with
| understanding intuitively some concepts that I hadn't deeply
| understood.
|
| I found it a little buggy or unpolished in places (like the
| scrolling/zooming behavior or how hint videos are only sometimes
| available) but that's a pretty minor complaint.
| troupe wrote:
| I've played it a bit with my kids. It seems to be a game version
| of the Nand 2 Tetris course: https://www.nand2tetris.org/
| SilasX wrote:
| My recent comment comparing the two:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38740170
| junon wrote:
| I love this game. It's super well made, and is endlessly fun. If
| you've never heard of it and have even the smallest, most remote
| interest in this stuff, do yourself a favor and pick it up.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| How do we formalize the concept of "turing complete, if it were
| just infinite." Like, it's not turing complete, but we can
| intuitively treat it as if it was. How do we formalize that
| concept of "close enough?"
| Quekid5 wrote:
| It's not exactly a formal definition, but I like Edwin Brady's
| "Pacman Complete"
| erwan577 wrote:
| I can only recommend this game to its target audience. It's quite
| addictive and offers an experience I found to be quite valuable.
|
| The English version has been crowd-translated into French,
| German, and Spanish, with more languages in progress, making the
| content more accessible.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Should have called it Turing compete
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| I bought this after seeing someone (I think it was the game's
| creator - excellent advertising) use it to solve Advent of Code
| problems on Reddit. It's really good, a very accessible
| introduction to how computers work.
|
| There were a couple of kinks in the UI that need to be ironed out
| like zooming and scrolling, but conceptually, the drag-and-drop
| UI for building circuits is excellent.
|
| I didn't get that far before life got in the way and I put it
| down - I think I was stuck on the adding bytes section. I'll have
| to pick it back up.
| tmiku wrote:
| Has anyone played both this and Shenzhen I/O? Which did you like
| better?
| michael_michael wrote:
| They're both worth getting. I haven't finished either game, so
| I can't talk about end-game value for either, but it certainly
| feels to me like Turing Complete is an educational game with
| puzzle components, while Shenzhen I/O is a straight puzzle
| game.
|
| Both are a lot of fun, and very well-made.
|
| Shenzhen I/O (like most Zachtronics games) has some nice
| worldbuilding touches like the printable datasheets for the
| made-up electrical components, and a barely-there programming
| language manual.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I've played and enjoyed both. I'll say I liked Turing Complete
| a lot more but it depends on what you're looking for.
|
| Shenzhen I/O is more a puzzle game where you get thrown a bunch
| of miniature puzzles you solve via programming cleverness to
| advance some overall story theme while enjoying general puzzle
| solving.
|
| Turing Complete is more a digital circuit sandbox which starts
| you off in a direction of building up more and more complicated
| components and abstractions and you get more and more freedom
| as you go until you've unlocked everything and it becomes a big
| sandbox for you. There is technically a loose "story" but it's
| more or less just something to give context around what you're
| currently trying to build in the level not an actual plot. I.e.
| you could read every line of "story" ahead of time and it would
| not detract from your first playthrough as it's not really a
| narrative.
|
| I will say Turing Complete starts off with a very limited feel
| though. The farther you make it into the game the less and less
| you see guardrails.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| I was looking to purchase this, I see it is on Steam and GOG but
| no Linux support. I hope that is planned in the future!
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| I have played it on Linux without issue (via Steam).
| spacetimeuser5 wrote:
| Will it run in Ubuntu on 4-core AMD Ryzen 3 4300U with Radeon
| Graphics (no virtual threads)?
| Arnavion wrote:
| It's had native Linux support since day one. I bought it (edit:
| on Steam) in its first week of release (2021-10) and it worked
| fine.
| lufte wrote:
| Not in GOG, for some reason.
| zamadatix wrote:
| GOG doesn't have a Proton equivalent like Steam does. If
| you're not familiar with that Proton is like a fancier
| packaged version of WINE supported by Valve as part of
| Steam, not a native version of the game.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| I'd love this as an iPad app! I want to play but I feel like it'd
| be something I'd want to just work on a puzzle occasionally while
| I'm waiting for food to microwave or something
| zamadatix wrote:
| I had/have great fun with this game. It's one that's best in
| large doses. And, like Factorio, if you return after a long while
| it's often more fun to restart than continue (or just stay in the
| endgame sandbox). UI could use a bit of polish and there has been
| a great deal of performance rework going on for the last couple
| of years not yet released. Verilog export is there nowadays but I
| haven't really tried it. The additional components you unlock
| towards the end really make the sandbox fun. It also has a
| scoring mechanism which adds a layer of competitiveness to the
| game but you don't unlock it until well into the game (well past
| the first computer).
|
| I played this extensively before deciding to go for a comp sci
| degree mid career (seemed like a fun thing to do, so far it has
| been!) and it made the base architecture stuff a breeze. I could
| highly recommend it for anyone looking for a fun refresher as
| well. "Fun" being a loose term - the fun is messing with boolean
| logic in a friendly environment, if you don't like that idea then
| you won't like this "game".
| eterm wrote:
| I'm a big fan of this genre of game, I have a small but growing
| steam collection of different ones. ( And some non-steam such as
| nandgame ).
|
| Turing complete is one of the better ones, the simulation seems
| reliable and the missions, after a fair bit of early access re-
| jigging are reasonably well structured.
|
| However, the UI isn't always super smooth, and the lack of hand-
| holding means it's better for someone like me who's gone through
| a similar journey before in other simulators.
|
| If you're looking for something similar that does a better job at
| explaining the concepts then I'd recommend "Silicon Zeroes". The
| game as a whole feels even slightly less polished, but has a cute
| storyline and in my opinion does a better job at explaining each
| level and what it's trying to introduce, and does a much better
| job with problem solving issues related to "The Clock".
|
| If you don't actually enjoy the the electronics part so much and
| just enjoy the psuedo-assembly aspect, then I'd recommend TIS100
| or Shenzhen I/O.
|
| If you prefer well-crafted puzzles then something like "Human
| Resource Machine" may be more your style.
|
| It's also worth noting this Turing Complete news post:
| https://steamcommunity.com/app/1444480/eventcomments/3806156...
|
| After no updates for a year, there was a news post in August 2023
| to say, "Sorry, there's a big new update coming soon!".
|
| And radio silence since then too.
|
| It seems the developer has got stuck with such a monumental "big
| rewrite" that it's ended up taking vastly longer than
| anticipated.
|
| I've been waiting for it to leave early access before going back
| into it, but I fear I might be waiting forever.
| gunalx wrote:
| Good game. Actually really like the way it teaches you about
| computer science and let's you make your own computer from
| scratch. It has some quirk's sometimes, but I feel there is
| nothing really quite comparable.
| GalaxyNova wrote:
| looks like it's down
| SigmundA wrote:
| Makes me think of Robot Odyssey [1] which first made digital
| logic click with me at an early age.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey
| spacetimeuser5 wrote:
| Will it run on 4-core AMD Ryzen 3 4300U with Radeon Graphics (no
| virtual threads)? The specs tell that i5 is needed.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Should be, I play on AMD. I think Steam just requires something
| be put there, the real requirement is a 64 bit processor
| capable of running Windows 10 or newer (since Steam dropped
| prior versions this month) in 64 bit mode (no 32 bit release of
| the game exists). The latter bit can optionally be fudged on
| Linux by using the built in Proton compatibility layer in
| Steam.
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