Turning machines?

Question

What's the difference between a deterministic turning machine, and a non-deterministic turning machine?

Answer 1

It's a TURING machine (named after the English mathematician and logician, Alan Turing), not a TURNING machine.

Answer 2

In a deterministic turning machine, you can turn either left or right. In a non-deterministic turning machine you can turn in both directions at once!

Answer 3

In a deterministic Turing machine, the action the machine takes at each time is determined by its program, its state and the symbol in the cell it's scanning.  Therefore, the behavior of a deterministic Turing machine is uniquely determined given its program, its input tape, and its starting state and location on the tape.  The program of a non-deterministic Turing machine on the other hand specifies many possible actions for each state and scanned symbol, and so a non-deterministic Turing machine can behave in many different ways on a given input.