Us programmers, we like to show off our stuff. Doing hard or downright unrealistic things. For example: porting doom to every system imaginable, making full fledged 3D games in 96 kb of memory, or what we are going to be talking about today: making everything Turing complete. What is Turing completeness? To fully comprehend Turing completeness, we need to understand what a Turing machine is. A Turing machine is a theoretical machine that can compute anything that is computable.

Why Java, why? Java, as a whole, is not the best. While it’s certainly not a bad language, it doesnt have the best language design. Why Java, do you require OOP? There’s no point. Now every kid in a High School CS Program have to memorize the following phrase: “public class Filename public static void main capital String args”. That’s so much boiler plate! It’s needed just for a single line to run.

This is an article version, hence equations won’t look how they were originally written. The actual PDF version is available here. Background Readers should have a basic understanding or background in the following concepts: Basic trigonometry How to work with angles Basic programming with angles Motivation I have been building a bipedal robot over the summer of 2022. I have needed easy, simple, straight to the point resources on control concepts that are necessary to create walking gaits for the bipedal robot.

In most programming languages, there’s a trade off between efficiency, and ease of use. It’s a spectrum of the two, for example, C would be on the efficiency side, and Javascript would be on the ease of use side. But both are usable for making large programs, there’s only a few languages you can think of so effecient that it is barely usable for the average programmer. You may have in mind x86 assembly, Fortran, or another archaic language.

If you haven’t seen a video of Boston Dynamic’s Spot, watch one. It’s so cool! Usually robots in the real world are just in factories, and not really like the fake old fasioned robots that can walk around and speak with that weird monotone voice. We may not be at the monotone voice part, (Good. That would be creepy.) but they are still extremely interesting. I thought making a robot dog would be a great project for learning arduino, and electronics a lot better.