Algoritmi viventi tra Shannon e Simondon

Abstract

Almost a century after Turing’s machine was theorised, a formal definition of what an algorithm is has still not been found by scholars. The reasons given are varied and it is clear that this is a problem that is not easy to solve. Nevertheless, one of the least travelled paths is the one that envisages the hypothesis of an algorithm that does not exhaust its potential in automatism. Starting from the algorithm written and implemented by the mathematician Claude Shannon in the 1950s in a machine made up of a group of relays, a mouse-shaped sensor and a maze structured in squares, the following work aims to understand whether a certain creative and evolutionary capacity can be found in the algorithm, i.e. the possibility of going beyond the logic of automatism. To be able to trace these capacities in the algorithm means, in the first instance, to try to verify the extent to which it is able to modify its own strategy according to the stimuli it receives and, in the second instance, to understand whether this creative and evolutionary ability responds to reflex or instinctual logic according to the distinction made by the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon in his courses on psychology in 1964.