Relegating to the Pictorial

Perhaps the Turing machine can be likened (albeit possibly a stretch) to some of the architectural ideals set forth in the 1960s.  Most specifically, the best known work of Superstudio and the conceptualized Continuous Monument, wherein nomadic people could plug in at any point on an immense grid which hyper-consumed major cities, theoretically freeing these people from the fragmentary space of the modernist tower-block, and spontaneously materializing a minimal domestic fantasy life.  This method of providing the means for the complex needs of living by way of a seemingly simple predisposed urban megaplan is interesting in the fact that it breaks down living to its most simple set of needs (the ruleset) and reconfigures it in a spatially succinct realm (the infinitely long tape, or here, the plane which stretches around the Earth).  Similar to the Turing Machine, the Continuous Monument was also very much conceived as a "paper" architecture, and should be viewed as a way of understanding the possibilities of technology instead of so much as a prescriptive model.

Cellular automata act as a diagrammatic model for the output of a predetermined ruleset.  This diagram can be used as a measure for the level of complexity able to be achieved by these rules and needs a further set of criteria applied in order to see the physical effects.