Turing Tumble is Turing-Complete

Abstract

It is shown that the toy Turing Tumble, suitably extended with an infinitely long game board and unlimited supply of pieces, is Turing-Complete. This is achieved via direct simulation of a Turing machine. Unlike previously informally presented constructions, we do not encode the finite control infinitely many times, we need only one trigger/ball-hopper pair, and we prove our construction correct. We believe this is the first natural extension of a marble-based computer that has been shown to be universal.