Richard Beard, award-winning author of The Day That Went Missing and Sad Little Men, thought he was writing his next book, a whole life memoir. The Universal Turing Machine is the title both of Beard’s memoir and the mass memoir project he hopes others will help him to build. View image in fullscreen Photograph: The Universal Turing MachineThe project takes its title from the test that Alan Turing devised to discern artificial intelligence from human intelligence. “The idea is that if you write your memoir, you are passing the Turing test,” Beard says. There is no commercial outcome – unless a publisher comes forward with an innovative suggestion of how to represent The Universal Turing Machine on paper.