TURING · The Tape That Reads Another Tape — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-

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TEE-SCI-CN-TUR-02-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

TURING · The Tape That Reads Another Tape Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

In 1936 Turing described a machine that reads a table of rules, and then another able to read the table of any other: the universal machine. Printed here are those two tapes.

A Author

Alan Turing

B Subject

Computing

C Aesthetic

Diagram · Typographic

Exploration

First a machine: a tape, a head and a table of rules that says what to write and which way to move. Then the move: encode that table as symbols on the tape of another machine, which can thereby behave like any of the previous ones.

A single machine imitates them all. That is what it means for an apparatus to be general-purpose and not an instrument for one task.

From there come the interpreter, the virtual machine, the emulator and the container. Each layer is a tape reading another's table, and today there are four or five stacked before reaching the silicon.

The same argument produces the limit. There exists no procedure that, reading any table at all, decides whether the machine will end up halting.

Turing published the two things together in 1936, aged twenty-four, in a paper whose declared subject was something else.

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