There are many references to it in public discussions, but trying to learn about it from Wikipedia is like reading in a new foreign language.
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I’m going to give you a roll of toilet paper and a pencil.
Then we’re going to come up with some set of symbols and some rules.
You will only be able to see one square of the toilet paper in front of you at a time and each square is either blank or has one (and only one) symbol in it.
Your only abilities are to move the toilet paper to the right, move it to the left, erase the symbol that is in the square in front of you, or write a new symbol in the square in front of you.
All of the rules are of the form “if the symbol in front of you is X then do Y” where Y is one of the things above.
Well there you go. That’s a Turing Machine.
Why is this important? Because what you have in front of you is a machine capable of doing everything every computer has ever done. Everything.
With enough toilet paper, rules, and symbols, you can calculate the digits of Pi, play Doom, fly a jet, or even browse the internet if you figure out some way to do the network communication.
That’s what makes it so interesting. Turing reduced all of the items necessary for modern computation down into its simplest form.
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