Manchester Illuminated Universal Turing Machine, #20

Roman Verostko

Manchester Illuminated Universal Turing Machine, #20 , – ongoing
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Mnemosyne
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Description
THE MANCHESTER
ILLUMINATED UNIVERSAL TURING MACHINE
by Roman Verostko, 1998

The Project: A family of algorithmic pen plotted drawings, each presented with the binary text for a Universal Turing Machine (UTM), was created for an exhibition in Manchester on the occasion of the Ninth International Symposium on Electronic Art (1998). They were created as homage to Alan Turing celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the first computer with a stored program, the Manchester "Baby" compute. Known also as the "Mark I prototype", it would have been the first "hard wired" UTM.

These drawings, reminiscent of medieval manuscript illuminations, celebrate Alan Turing's concept of a UTM by presenting it as a valuable precious text of our own time. Executed on hot pressed Arches, each work includes a burnished gold leaf enhancement.
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    • Arts and Visual Culture
      • drawings
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Manchester Illuminated Universal Turing Machine, #20
1998, 30" by 22"
pen plotted drawing with gold leaf
What is a Universal Turing Machine? The gating logic for circuit boards in all general computers descends from a logical procedure known as a Universal Turing Machine (UTM). The logic for this algorithm by Alan Turing (1912-54) was written in 1936 and published in 1937 in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. This paper, “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem", planted the seminal idea for all general computers.
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2 publications