An origami Universal Turing Machine design

Abstract

It has been known since 1996 that deciding whether a collection of creases on a piece of paper can be fully folded flat without causing self-intersection or adding new creases is an NP-Hard problem (Bern and Hayes). In their proof, a binary state was implemented as a pleat, with the state corresponding to the pleat layering order; states then interact via pleat intersections. Building on some of the machinery of their result, we will present a method for constructing an origami NAND logic gate, leading to a theoretical origami Universal Turing Machine.