Meet ROBI.

In this game, you'll put a robot to work — a robot that obeys cards, without ever thinking.

Robi is the little lighthouse robot. Tonight is the festival of lights — and he's the one getting the hallway lamps ready.

But Robi has a problem…

The hallway of lamps

You have fingers: tap the lamps to turn them on or off. Try it!

tap at least 2 lamps…

Robi has no fingers. And he has another problem, an even funnier one…

Robi only sees ONE lamp at a time

Press the button 2 times to make Robi walk.

He only sees the lamp with the red frame, right in front of him. The other lamps? He can't see them at all.

move forward 2 times…

The lighthouse keeper gave him a CARD

IF the lamp is ON 💡
→ I turn it OFF, and I move forward

Press the button: Robi will look at his lamp and obey the card. That's all he knows how to do.

He has a 2nd card!

IF the lamp is ON 💡
→ I turn it OFF, and I move forward IF the lamp is OFF ⚫
→ I turn it ON, and I move forward

Press the button: this time the lamp is off — watch which card Robi uses.

Two cards, one for each case. That's what the festival is: flip everything — turn off what's shining, turn on what's sleeping.

THE MISSION: flip the whole hallway!

💡 → I turn it off, I move forward ⚫ → I turn it on, I move forward

Press the button until Robi reaches the end of the hallway. At every step, guess: which card will light up?

steps: 0

Bonus for curious minds

The endless tape
that dreamed up computers

Press “One step” to make this machine count, yourself, one power at a time. This is Alan Turing's real machine (1936): an endless strip of paper and only three powers. It counts in binary: it turns 101 (five) into 110 (six), one little rule at a time. Robi has been doing nothing else since the very beginning.

READlook at the symbol under the head
WRITEerase it, then write another one
MOVEslide over one square, then start again
The machine is asleep steps · 0

The rule it follows

It only knows three. Not one of them requires thinking.

From the tape to your screen

  • Three powers — read, write, move — and this strip of paper just did an addition.
  • Add more rules, and the same little machine can play music, draw maps… or think.
  • Your phone does exactly that, about 3 billion times every second.
  • Turing invented it on paper, twelve years before the first computer that could keep its program in its memory.

You just ran a TURING MACHINE.

Listen closely, then press the big button: you're about to see Robi again, at computer speed.

In 1936 — before the first computer! — an English scientist, Alan Turing, invented on paper a machine made of three things: a tape of squares (your hallway), a head that sees only one square (Robi), and rule cards (his two cards).

His brilliant idea: with those three things and the right cards, you can do the same things as today's computers — games, photos, music, math.

Your tablet, your game console, the computer at school: super-fast Robis, with billions of lamps.

Look at your screen. No — REALLY look at it.

Here, you're going to draw with lamps: tap the squares of the grid, like a machine.

Your screen is a hallway of lamps. Millions of tiny lamps (they're called pixels), on or off, just like Robi's.

tap the lamps in the grid to invent YOUR pattern

And it's not just the screen. You run into lamps and rule cards from morning to night:

Your game controller
a pure rule card: IF you press A → the character jumps.
A photo
millions of colored lamps, remembered in just the right order.
A message
every letter you type = a tiny drawing made of lamps that travels.
The square code at the restaurant
a QR code is your grid from earlier, giant-sized: black and white squares that a machine reads square by square.
The crosswalk
IF the button is pressed → the walk signal lights up. A rule card, on a real street.
Matchy and Graig
when you play at camp: underneath, squares, rules, little Robi steps — billions every second.

One single idea — lamps and rule cards — and it runs your games, your photos, your messages and your cartoons. That's what Turing figured out, on paper, in 1936.

You're done! If you're curious, there's one bonus left: