Visualizing Composed Turing Machines
summary
Two visualization tools are built into FSM (a Racket DSL): a static transition-diagram generator that turns composed Turing-machine descriptions into a single graph, and a dynamic stepwise simulator that shows the tape, highlights head movement, and lets users step or finish macro-executions. An empirical pilot with 10 students reports over 70% positive ratings for clarity and >80% for usefulness in design and debugging, supporting the claim of low extraneous cognitive load. Future work targets multi-tape diagrams and micro-stepping into submachines.
AI-written summary · about