A Turing Child Computer The great-grantchild of the great mathematician and computer scientist Alan Mathison Turing is a student at the Sapientia University (nicknamed GAMT) and he is studying -- what else -- Computer Science. He became aware of the fundamental invention of his famous great-grandfather -- today called Turing machine, -- and he had an idea to further develop this simple computer. The main difference of the architecture of his simple computer is a 2D memory cell grid, M -- instead of the linear cell structure of the old Turing machine -- with an address pointer mechanism which reflects the 2D structure by the possibility of addressing one after another only the neighboring cells in Left, Right, Up and Down direction. The computer has a single Accumulator register A, which can hold 0 or positive integer values, just like the memory cells M. A computer program is a sequence of instruction codes read from a tape one by one and are immediately executed. The complete instruction set of this computer is listed in the table below: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Code Effect/Meaning ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Start/Stop 0 start the execution, NOP 1 repeat the next instruction 3 times 2 repeat the next instruction 4 times 3 stop the execution Set memory/pointer/A 4 clear memory, all memory cells are set to 0, reset memory 5 set memory pointer to default, reset address pointer 6 set Accumulator register A to 0, reset A 7 increment A, increase the value of A by 1 Move memory pointer 8 step Right, point to the Right neighbour cell 9 step Up, point to the Up neighbour cell 10 step Left, point to Left neighbour cell 11 step Down, point to the Down neighbour cell Read/Write 12 write A to M, copy the content of A to the currently pointed memory cell 13 write A to the standard output, display the character codified by the value of A (see below) 14 write (17^A)(mod 37) to the currently pointed memory location, well, thereis an arithmetic coprocessor too:) 15 read M to A, read the content of the currently pointed memory cell in the Accumulator ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When the content of A is displayed, each value is the code of a character from the list below in increasing order, such that the first character has code 1, and the last character has code 36. !@_-+.;?/:ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ GAMT has a message to you, a message displayed by a program which he wrote in the machine code of his computer. Unfortunately, he hid the code in a tricky way, he said, actually we are seeing it, without realising we see it. Can you discover the program code, and then write an emulator of his computer, run the program, and send us the message revealed? P.S. A last minute hint. We found out that the program code is indeed right here: it is just hidden in this text file! The two spacing characters of this text has to be converted, Space and Tab in 1 and 0 respectively, and read as numbers in base two, each group of four is a machine code. So all we actually see and read in this text file are just comments for this hidden code!