Understanding Turing's Universal Machine -- Personal Style in Program Description

Abstract

The study presents the results of an experiment on programmers' descriptions and understanding. The 12 participants, students of computing, have produced notes on Turing's description of his universal machine and, in a second experiment phase, have made mutual evaluations of their notes. The analysis of the resulting notes shows large individual differences of styles and evaluations with respect to all significant issues of the descriptions and understanding, including the evaluations of program descriptions having particularly full formal characteristics. The consequences of the observations for the teaching of programming and for programming methodologies are discussed. The Appendix gives an annotated version of Turing's description of the universal machine.