Pasadena, California. The Theory of Automata is born at the Hixon Symposium on Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior. John von Neumann had been thinking about the basic ideas for some time, and had presented some of them two years earlier at Princeton. He asked, for example, whether an automaton could generate another equally complicated one, with small differences, and eventually evolve as a species. At the heart of von Neumann’s thinking is the Universal Turing Machine, which, given the description of any other Turing Machine, can imitate it. These concepts would be published by von Neumann many years later, in 1966, in the book “Theory of Self-reproducing Automata.”
