Can you feel the machine?

In the recent academy award winning movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr tests a young Oppenheimer.

Bohr: Algebra's like sheet music, the important thing isn't can you read music, it's can you hear it. Can you hear the music, Robert?

Oppenheimer: Yes, I can.

I can't hear the algebra but I feel the machine. 

A Turing machine has a formal mathematical definition but that's not how I think of it. When I write code, or prove a theorem involving computation, I feel the machine processing step by step. I don't really visualize or hear the machine, but it sings to me, I feel it humming along, updating variables, looping, branching, searching until it arrives at its final destination and gives us an answer. I know computers don't physically work exactly this way, but that doesn't stop my metaphorical machine from its manipulations.

I felt this way since I first started programming in Basic in the 1970's, or maybe even before that on calculators or using the phone or sending a letter. I could feel the process moving along.

So when I took my first CS theory class, I could feel those finite automata moving along states and the PDAs pushing and popping. I even felt the languages pumping. After graduate complexity, I knew I found my calling.

And that's why I prefer Kolmogorov Complexity arguments more than information theory. Information doesn't sing to me but I can see the compression.

As computational complexity evolved, focusing more on combinatorics, algebra and analysis, and often on models that have little to do with computation, I sometimes find myself lost amongst the static math. But give me a Turing machine and I can compute anything!