John Henry von Neumann
John Henry von Neumann is a competition between a human and a machine to complete a drawing in an eight-hour workday; it aims to recast this archetypal conflict between human and machine labor in terms fitting the age of the digital computer. Both the human and the computer are executing the same algorithm, using the same initial values, to produce a drawing of an infinite non-repeating pattern of lines. The computer runs custom software and draws with a pen plotter. The human uses scratch paper and draws with a pen and paper.
The advent of the digital computer initiated a fundamental change in how we think about work. The term “computer” once referred to people who carried out complex mathematical calculations. As these tasks were taken over by faster and less error-prone machines, so was the name of computer. The transition from human-as-computer to machine-as-computer brought with it an expansion in our understanding of what a “computer” is capable of; word processing, games, graphics, network communications, environmental simulations have all been folded into the day-to-day definition of what a computer can do. Yet despite the ever-expanding ubiquity of the computer, innovations in interface and other abstractions have made it harder to engage directly with what lies at the core of the computer’s power: repetition. It is the repetition of thousands of millions of discontinuous symbol manipulations that forms the basis for what we see on the screen or the printer. Speed in the physical expresses a relation between time and distance; speed in the computer is measured in cycles, in discrete and equivalent operations per microsecond.
The drawing is based on a cellular automata (CA), a cellular model invented by John von Neumann in the early 1940s. A CA consists of a grid of cells, each in one of a fixed number of states. The CA used here is an analog variant where each cell has a value between 0 and 359. The paper is divided into a 1 cm grid 40 cells across. Each cell contains a single line drawn from the center to the edge of the cell at an angle calculated using the angles of the three cells directly above, to the left, and to the right. Unlike a classic CA, the value of the cells to the left and right are each given a weight of 1/3, while the center cell has a weight of 1/2. This weighting produces the swirling pattern seen in the drawing. Both the computer and the human are given the same values for the first row of cells. These values are generated by a single roll of two ten-sided and one eight-sided dice per cell to produce a value between 0 and 359.
The race begins once the starting values are determined and continues for eight hours. In keeping with the traditions of the eight-hour workday, and to further emphasize the terms of the competition, the artist has a thirty-minute lunch break while the machine continues to draw.
During the first performance at Machine Project on June 28, 2009, the computer produced a drawing twelve meters long while the artist produced a drawing 15 centimeters long. Thus, the computer outperformed the artist by a factor of 800. In other terms, the computer drew 480,000 cells, and the human 600, meaning the computer outperformed the artist by a factor of 800. Surprisingly the computer’s drawing was not perfect and shows infrequent but interesting errors in the output.
