Candy Button Paper
Candy Button Paper
When it came to eating strips of candy buttons, there were two main strategies. Some kids carefully removed each bead, checking closely for paper residue before eating. [To the right, a small section of a strip of Candy Buttons paper is shown. Two red buttons have been removed from the top of the strip.] [To the left, a long strip is shown. It seems to be waving in the air.] Others tore the candy off haphazardly, swallowing large scraps of paper as they ate. Then there were the lonely few of us who moved back and forth on the strip, eating rows of beads here and there, pretending we were Turing machines. [A strip is shown from bird's eye view. Many rows of buttons have already been eaten.]

This comic refers to Candy Buttons , a type of candy sold by Necco in the U.S. since 1980. Because they were glued to paper, each candy button would have some paper stuck to it. As said in the comic, some kids would carefully check each candy button to make sure they would not accidentally eat paper, while some kids didn't care and ripped them off, eating large scraps of paper in the process.
Because of the resemblance of the strips of paper to the tape of a Turing Machine , a small minority of children (possibly only Randall or some of his friends) pretended to be a Turing Machine by creating rules and executing them upon the tape of candy exactly like a real Turing Machine would do.
The title text refers to the fact that, although it would be hypothetically possible to create a Turing Machine that can only delete symbols, the information density of the tape would be greatly reduced, and the original Turing Machine could read and write from the tape it operated on.
When it came to eating strips of candy buttons, there were two main strategies. Some kids carefully removed each bead, checking closely for paper residue before eating. [To the right, a small section of a strip of Candy Buttons paper is shown. Two red buttons have been removed from the top of the strip.] [To the left, a long strip is shown. It seems to be waving in the air.] Others tore the candy off haphazardly, swallowing large scraps of paper as they ate. Then there were the lonely few of us who moved back and forth on the strip, eating rows of beads here and there, pretending we were Turing machines. [A strip is shown from bird's eye view. Many rows of buttons have already been eaten.]
