One-act sketch: The Adrenal Machine#

Last tended 2026-02-17

Introducing the context#

Turing Machine and Von Neumann Architecture enthusiasts have long fixated on a possible but unverifiable collaboration meeting between Alan Turing and John Von Neumann in 1943. It is well documented that the two collaborated when Turing was at Princeton ('36 - '38) as a fellow (even including Von Neumann offering to create a permanent position there for Turing on his team). The question, though, is whether the two would have had the chance to brainstorm at a critical moment when each, in effect, had half of a conceptual coin that the other needed. That "critical moment" was in mid 1943. Turing was serving in a top-secret, code-breaking solutions researcher capacity, and he was collaborating on the breakthrough development of the vacuum-tube switching based Colossus, brainchild of Tommy Flowers, that would produce the 2nd-round of Bletchley Park code-breaking triumphs. It was still a single-function computer, but its switching design was a stunning leap forward. Von Neumann was at that time the foundational logician of the Allied war effort—a mind capable of distilling the chaos of ballistic trajectories, shock wave physics, and the terrifyingly complex implosion method for the 'Fat Man' into pure, computable structures. However, it was a time that Von Neumann foresaw that a transformation in computing speed and flexibility was the confounding barrier that must be overcome for any and all of the physics and mathematics challenges to be surmounted. The volume and variations of computations awaiting completion were well in excess of what the human computers (cadres of talented women, both in the case of the UK and the US) and IBM mechanical calculators could fulfill. The computation backlog was devastating. Vexed by this "barrier of an epoch", Von Neumann's mind was consumed by a 'Turing-Machine' challenge: how to move the logic out of the wires and into the memory.

The 1943 overlap and the curious correlation

  • In February, Von Neumann arrives in the UK to consult for the Royal Navy on the physics of underwater explosions and the "shock wave" mathematics needed for anti-submarine warfare
  • In March, Turing arrives back in the UK from a trip to the US for matters of code breaking collaboration
  • So the stage is set for a potential meeting between the two ... but there is no record of such a meeting, secrecy obligations for each of them would have made collaboration fraught, and neither man's letters or papers speak of it.
  • BUT, curiously, when Von Neumann arrives back in the US, he seems to be a man with an epiphany that he's ready to catalyze into a great leap forward. He joins the ENIAC project almost immediately upon his return, and within a year he produces the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, which essentially "codifies" the modern computer (a sudden clarity on stored programs)
    • We must concede that Von Neumann had logged numerous and varied great leaps by this point in his intellectually incandescent life, but this is the one with the especially intriguing timing.

The Charles Gifford revelation (1970's)

C.H.O.D. Gifford was a British economist and intelligence officer who worked in the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park during WWII. His gravitas was further enhanced over his life stemming from his membership in the "Small Group" or the "Tuesday Club"—a circle of high-level British intellectuals and intelligence figures. In interviews conducted in the 1970s (most notably by the historian Christopher Andrew, or during the gathering of data for the History of British Intelligence), Gifford mentioned that Turing and Von Neumann did indeed meet in the UK.

This one-act dialogue is a creative dramatization based on the historical testimony of Gifford, who alleged the two were able to arrange a meeting, made allowable in part because their pre-war relationship was known and understood by influential persons such as those in the Tuesday Club.

Note on Provenance#

The technical themes herein—specifically the metaphors regarding dual-rate sampling and event-based logging—were developed through a collaborative dialogue between Kurt Bestul and Gemini, an AI collaborator from Google.

  • Model: Gemini 3 Flash (Free Tier)
  • Date of Dialogue: February 17, 2026
  • Context: Developed as a fictionalized exploration of the "Whole Picture" theory of computer architecture.
The one act play#

CHARACTERS

  • ALAN TURING (31): British mathematician. Intense, fidgety, dressed in a rumpled suit with a gas mask bag slung over his shoulder. He speaks in rapid, sometimes staccato bursts.
  • JOHN VON NEUMANN (39): Hungarian-American polymath. Impeccably dressed, charming, and radiating a quiet, terrifying intellectual power. He speaks with a "warm" or "pronounced" Hungarian accent and a somewhat famed, rapid-fire intensity that mirrors his "lightning-fast" mental calculations

SETTING

A private wood-paneled room in the Athenaeum Club, London. 1943. A blackout curtain covers the window. A single coal fire pops in the grate. A chalkboard stands center-stage, covered in messy fluid dynamics equations.

VON NEUMANN
(Pacing before the chalkboard, glass of Sherry in hand)
The Admiralty wants to know how a bubble collapses under a hull, Alan. They want a single, lethal number. But to find it, I need a thousand clerks working for a thousand years. Or... I need a lightning bolt that can do arithmetic.

TURING
(Sitting on the edge of a leather chair, biting his thumbnail)
Arithmetic is trivial, Johnny. It’s just bookkeeping. You’re building a bigger abacus. What you need isn’t a calculator; it’s a logical organ.

VON NEUMANN
(Smiling)
A logical organ. Always the biologist! My "abacus" in Philadelphia—the ENIAC—has eighteen thousand vacuum tubes. It’s a cathedral of glass and heat. But it’s a stupid cathedral. If I want it to change tasks, my engineers have to spend two days pulling cables like telephone operators. It has no... what did you call it in your ’36 paper? It has no "Internal State."

TURING
(Springing up)
Because you’re treating the instructions as a manual and the data as the ledger. They are the same thing! A number can be a quantity, yes—seven apples—but a number can also be an order. "Pick up the apple." If the machine can store the order in the same cellar where it stores the apples...

VON NEUMANN
(Stopping mid-stride)
...then the machine can rewrite its own manual.

TURING
Exactly. It doesn't just calculate; it evolves the calculation. We’ve seen it at Bletchley—I can’t say how—but we are using high-speed valves to recognize patterns. Not numbers. Patterns. But the problem, Johnny, is the "Now." A machine doesn't have a "Now" unless we give it one.

VON NEUMANN
(Intrigued)
A discretization of time? You aren't just computing; you’re observing the computation.

TURING
(Grabbing a piece of chalk)
Think of the data flow. If I want to know if a circuit has "clicked," I can't just watch it lazily. I need a sampling pulse—a high-frequency burst every microsecond—to snap a picture of the voltage. If the voltage is high, we log a "hit." If we wait too long, the moment is gone. The event is lost to the noise.

VON NEUMANN
But Alan, if you sample at that frequency constantly, you’ll drown in your own data. Your memory "cellar" will be full of "zeros" before you ever find a "one."

TURING
Which is why the machine must be adaptive. A dual-rate approach! When the machine is "Idle"—waiting for a signal—it should breathe slowly. A steady, low-frequency heartbeat. Every thirty seconds, perhaps, to check the temperature of the room.

VON NEUMANN
(Laughing)
And then... an event-based trigger?

TURING
Yes! The moment the vibration—the electrical noise—crosses a threshold for more than a few cycles, the machine "Wakes." It switches to the burst. It logs the peak, the average, the essence of the crisis. And only when the "Cooldown" period is over—when the noise drops below the threshold for ten seconds—does it return to its slow, steady slumber.

VON NEUMANN
(Softly)
You’re describing a machine with an adrenal system. You want it to have a pulse that races when it's excited and slows when it's bored.

TURING
It’s the only way to capture the "Truth" without needing a warehouse the size of London to store the paper tape. We don’t need every data point, Johnny. We only need the meaningful ones.

VON NEUMANN
(Walking to the chalkboard, erasing a section of fluid dynamics)
Wait. If we use your "Universal Tape" logic, but instead of a physical tape, we use these high-frequency pulses... we create a reservoir. (He draws a box on the board) Central Processing. (He draws another) Memory. The instructions sit in the memory alongside the data. The machine looks at a cell, sees an instruction, executes it, then looks at the next cell and finds... a variable. It doesn't know the difference. It just flows.

TURING
It’s a digital ghost. You provide the house; I provide the soul.

VON NEUMANN
(Quietly)
In America, we have the hardware, Alan. We have the steel and the money. But we are building a body without a brain.

TURING
And here, we have the brain, but we’re starving. We’re building the logic in the mud with scavenged parts.

VON NEUMANN
(Raising his glass)
Then let’s trade. You give me the "Universal" logic—this idea of the pulse and the program. I will go back and build the "Architecture." A physical structure that can hold your ghost.

TURING
(Grins, scribbling a logic gate on the board)
If we do this, Johnny... we won't just be calculating the collapse of bubbles. We’ll be simulating the universe.

VON NEUMANN
One microsecond at a time.

(TURING’s chalk flies across the board, sketching the first outlines of a stored-program computer. VON NEUMANN watches, his mind already crossing the Atlantic.)

FADE OUT.

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