UNIVERSAL TURING MACHINE

Play Like an Idiot

The architecture of John Von Neumann and Warren McCulloch's "logic machine" was established in 1936 by Alan Turing's theoretical Universal Machine, which. like SEER, is a finite state machine.
ANNOTATION
|...| John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI, MIT, 2008
pp.70-73


Turing's 1936 paper on the Universal Machine was instrumental in arriving at a new understanding of a real-abstract machine. The Turing Machine: comprises three parts:

1) a reading/writing "head"
2) an infinitely long "tape" divided into squares which pass along the head
3) a table of instructions (state transition table) which would tell the head what to do in relation to the machine's state. It would ask: is the mark absent or present on the tape?

Depending on the outcome the machine encounters, it would:

a) enter a mark
b) erase a mark
c) leave the square blank

The Turing Machine is the first example of a finite state machine. Data entering as a string of symbols (1 or 0) are encoded as absent or present. Instructions: If no mark = (state 1) enter mark, move to square on left = (state 2); if there is a mark move to square on the right and remain in state 2. The tape serves as a memory. Turing's thesis was that “every computation expressible as an algorithm, or every determinate procedure in a formal system, has its equivalent in a universal computing machine (aka Universal Turing Machine)”
To return directly to Lacan and Seminar II, this universality makes it a new kind of machine which is defined by a logic or function rather than a material structure.
This, Lacan suggests, is a characteristic which such machines and humans share. But humans also have access to the imaginary-symbolic] a logical form which is given equivalence in a set of algorithms. A number of machines, from ENIAC (1946) to UNIVAC (1946) were automated, self-regulating arbitrary symbols combine to rules of composition – syntax, to produce more complex operations. Johnston: "This behaviour is used to physically instantiate a symbol system with its own independent rules or syntax." In this way thinking machines automating the “laws of thought” unlike any previous machine.