L'Imitatore

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Installation

L'Imitatore

A slow physical Turing machine, watched by an artificial intelligence that believes it is the mechanism.

Drawing of the installation: a row of black and white cells forms the tape. Above it runs a horizontal rail with a motor at one end and a carriage, the head, pointing with a red triangle at the cell it is reading.
The tape, the rail and the head. Diagram, not to scale.

At every step the AI looks at the tape through a camera and says aloud the move it is about to make. A hidden controller knows the correct rule. If the AI is wrong, the machine makes the correct move anyway and the AI has to explain its mistake.

Each session leaves a first-person story written by the AI and a log of the steps, which is turned into sound.

  1. 01Concept
  2. 02How it works
  3. 03Story and sound
  4. 04Technical
  5. 05For curators

There is also a virtual version to try in the browser: a language model plays the AI on a simulated machine. Open the virtual version.