Part 15

In 1955, Lejaren A. Hiller, Jr., and L. M. Isaacson began to program the ILLIAC computer at the University of Illinois to compose music. The computer actually published its work, including “Illiac Suite for String Quartet,” Copyright 1957, New Music Editions, done in the style of Palestrina. All music lies somewhere between the complete randomness of, say, the hissing of electrons in vacuum tubes and the orderliness of a sustained tone. No less a master than Stravinsky has called composition “the great technique of selection,” and the computer can be taught to select in about any degree we desire. Hiller describes the process, in which the machine is given fourteen notes representing two octaves of the C-major scale, and restricted to “first-species counterpoint.” By means of this screening technique, the computer “composed” by a trial-and-error procedure that may be analogous to that of the human musician. Each note was examined against the criteria assigned; if it passed, it was stored in memory; if not, another was tried. If after fifty trials no right note was found, the “composition” was abandoned, much as might be done by a human composer who has written himself into a corner, and a new start was made. In an hour of such work, ILLIAC produced several hundred short melodies—a gold mine for a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith! It was then told to produce two-voice counterpoint for the basic melodies. “Illiac Suite” is compared, by its programmers at least, with the modern music of Bartok.

Purists whose sensibilities are offended by the very notion of computer music point out that music is subjective—a means of conveying emotion from the heart of the composer to that of the listener. Be that as it may, the composition itself is objective and can be rigorously analyzed mathematically, before or after the fact. From a technical standpoint there seems to be only one question about this new music—who composed it, the programmer or the computer?

An interesting sidelight to computer music is its use to test the acoustics of as yet unbuilt auditoriums. Bell Telephone Laboratories has devised such a machine in its Acoustical and Visual Research Department. The specifications of the new auditorium are fed into the computer, followed by music recorded on tape. The computer’s output is then this music as it will sound in the new hall. Critical experts listen and decide if the auditorium acoustics are all right, or if some redesign is in order.

_The Machine at Play_

The computer’s game-playing ability in chess and other games has been described. It is getting into the act in other fields, spectator sports as well. Baseball calls on the computer to plan season strategy and predict winners. When Roger Maris began his home-run string, an IBM 1401 predicted that he had 55 chances in 100 of beating Ruth’s record. Workers at M.I.T. have developed a computer program that answers questions like “Did the Red Sox ever win six games in a row?” and “Did every American League team play at least once in each park in every month?”

An IBM RAMAC computer is handling the management of New York’s Aqueduct race track, and promises to do a better job than the human bosses, thus saving money for the owners and the State of New York Tax Commission. The Fifteenth Annual Powderpuff Derby, the all-women transcontinental air race, was scored by a Royal Precision LGP-30 computer, and sports car enthusiasts have built their own “rally” computers to gauge their progress. The Winter Olympics at Innsbruck, Austria, will be scored by IBM’s RAMAC, and even bowling gets an assist from the computer in the form of a scoring device added to the automatic pin-setter, bad news to scorekeepers who fudge to boost their points.

An IBM 704 has proved a handy tool for blackjack players with a system for winning 99 per cent of the time, and rumor has it that a Los Angeles manufacturer plans to market a computer weighing only two pounds and costing $5, for horse-players.

Showing that the computer can be programmed with tact is the demonstrator that answers a man’s age correctly if he answers ten questions but announces only that a woman is over twenty-one. Proof that the computer has invaded just about every occupation there is comes to light in the news that a Frankfurt travel agency uses a computer called Zuse L23 as an agent. The traveler simply fills out a six-question form, and in a few seconds Zuse picks the ideal vacation from a choice of 500. Computers, it seems, are already telling us where to go.

_Business Outlook_

The computer revolution promises to reach clear to the top of the business structure, rather than find its level somewhere in middle management. The book, _Management Games_ lists more than 30,000 business executives who have taken part in electronic computer management “games” in some hundred different versions. The first widely used such game was developed in 1956 by the American Management Association. While such games are for educational purposes, their logical extension is the actual conduct of business by a programmed computer.

In his book, _Industrial Dynamics_, Dr. J. W. Forrester points out that a high-speed digital computer can be used in analyzing as many as 2,000 variables such as costs, wages, sales, and employment. This is obviously so far beyond human capability that the advantage of computer analysis becomes evident. A corollary benefit is the speed inherent in the computer which makes it possible to test a new policy or manufacturing program in hours right in the computer, rather than waiting for months or years of actual implementation and possible failure. For these reasons another expert has predicted that most businesses will be using computer simulations of their organizations by 1966. Regardless of the timetable, it is clear that the computer has jumped into business with both its binary digits and will become an increasingly powerful factor.

“_Men have become the tools of their tools._”

—Thoreau

9: The Computer and Automation

In his movie, _City Lights_, Charlie Chaplin long ago portrayed the terrible plight of the workman in the modern factory. Now that the machine is about to take over completely and relieve man of this machinelike existence, it is perhaps time for Charlie to make another movie pointing up this new injustice of civilization or machine’s inhumanity to man. It seems to be damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t.

For some strange reason, few of us become alarmed at the news of a computer solving complex mathematics, translating a book, or processing millions of checks daily, but the idea of a computer controlling a factory stimulates union reprisals, editorials in the press against automation, and much general breast-beating and soul-searching. Perversely we do not seem to mind the computer’s thinking as much as we do its overt action.

It is well to keep sight of the fact that automation is no new revolution, but the latest development in the garden variety of industrial revolution that began a couple of centuries ago in England:

Mechanization was the first step in that revolution, mechanization being the application of power to supplement the muscles of men. Mass production came along as the second step at the turn of this century. It was simply an organization of mechanized production for faster, more efficient output.

Automation is the latest logical extension of the two earlier steps, made possible by rapid information handling and control. Recent layoffs in industry triggered demonstrations, including television programs, that would indicate we suspect automation of having a rather cold heart. The computer is the heart of automation.

None of these steps is as clear-cut or separate as it may seem without some digging into history and an analysis of what we find. For example, while we generally consider that the loom was simply mechanized during the dawn of industrial revolution, the seeds of computer control were sown by Jacquard with punched-card programming of the needles in his loom. Neither is it sufficient to say that the present spectacle of automated pushbutton machines producing many commodities is no different from the introduction of mass-produced tractors. Tractors, after all, displaced horses; the computer-controlled factory is displacing men who don’t always want to be put out to pasture.

Automation is radically changing our lives. It is to be hoped that intelligent and humane planning will facilitate an orderly adjustment to this change. Certainly workers now toil in safer and pleasanter surroundings. It is reported that smashed toes and feet, hernia, eye trouble, and similar occupational accidents have all but disappeared in automated automobile plants. Unfortunately other occupational hazards are reportedly taking the place of these, and the psychological trauma induced by removal of direct contact with his craft has given more than one worker stomach ulcers. Let us investigate this transfer of contact from man to computer-controlled machine.

A paper presented at the First Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control, held in Moscow in 1960, uses as its introductory sentence, “Automatic control always involves computing.” The writer then points out that historically the computing device was analog in nature and tied so closely with the measuring and control elements as to be indistinguishable as an actual computer. In more recent history, however, the trend has been to separate the computer. With this trend is another important change, that of using the digital computer in automatic control.

One of the first papers to describe this separate computer function is “Instrument Engineering, Its Growth and Its Promise,” by Brown, Campbell, and Marcy, published in 1949. “Naturally,” the authors state, “a computer will be used to control the process.” Not a shop foreman or an engineer, but a computer. Watt’s “flyball” governor pioneered the field; more recent and more obvious examples of control by computers include ships guided by “Iron Mike” and airplanes flown by the automatic pilot. These were analog devices, and the first use of a digital computer as a control was in 1952, quite recently in our history. This airborne digital control computer was built by Hughes and was called “Digitac.”

Since most industries have been in existence for many years, far antedating aviation, electronics, and the modern computer, the general incorporation of such control has been difficult both because of the physical problem of altering existing machines and the mental phenomenon of inertia. Factory management understandably is slow to adopt a revolutionary technique, and most control systems now in use in industry are still analog in nature. However, where new plants are built from the ground up for computer control, the results are impressive. Designed by United Engineering, the Great Lakes 80-inch hot strip mill automatically processes 25-ton slabs of steel. More than 1,000 variables are controlled, and 200 analog signals and 100 digital computer-generated signals are used in the process. The steel sheets are shot out of the rolls at some 45 miles an hour, or about 66 feet a second! A human supervisor would have a difficult job just watching the several hundred signals related to thickness, temperature, quality, and so on, much less trying to think what to do if he noticed something out of specifications. This would be roughly analogous to an editor trying to proofread a newspaper as it flashes by on the press and making corrections back in the linotype room before any typographical errors were printed. The new computer-controlled mill has an output of about 450,000 tons a month, twice that of the next largest in operation.

American control experts who attended the Moscow conference brought back the information that Russian effort in computer control is greater than that in the United States, and that the Russians are more aware of what we are doing in the field than we are of their progress. Their implementation of modern computer control may be made easier because their industries are newer and do not represent such a long-established and expensive investment in hard-to-modify existing equipment.

Basically, at least, computer control is simple and can be compared to the feedback principle that describes many physical systems including the workings of our own bodies. In practice, the computer can be put in charge of producing something, and by sampling the output of its work can constantly make corrections or improvements that are desired. This is of course an extreme simplification, and the control engineer speaks of “on-line” operation, of adaptive systems that adjust to a changing environment, of predictive control, and so on. One vital requirement of the computer involved in a control process, obviously, is that it cannot take its time about its computations. The control computer is definitely operating “on the line”; that is, in real time, or perhaps even looking ahead by a certain amount so that it can not only keep up with production but also predict forthcoming changes and make corrections in time to be of use.

The human process controller is stuck with methods like those of the cook who mixes up his recipe with a spoonful of this, and three pinches of that, sniffs or tastes the batter subjectively, and may end up with a masterpiece or a flop. Computer control processes the same batter through the pipes at a thousand gallons a minute and catches infinitesimal variations in time to correct them before the hotcakes are baked. In effect it makes hindsight into foresight by compressing time far more than man could hope to do.

Early applications of the computer in industrial processes were simply those of data “loggers,” or monitors. It was still up to the human operator to interpret what the computer observed and recorded, and to throw the switch, close the valve, or push the panic button as the case demanded. Actual computer control, the “closing of the loop” as the engineers call it, is the logical next step. This replaces the human operator, or at least relegates him to the role of monitor.

The Great Lakes hot-rolling steel mill has been mentioned as an example of complete computer control. In Hayange, France, the first European completely automated steel-beam mill is slated to go into operation late in 1962. The Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation in this country uses a digital computer system to control continuous annealing in its Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, plant, and is evaluating an RCA computer-controlled tin-plating line operating at 3,000 feet a minute. Newer computer-control applications in the offing include sintering and other metal production operations.

To those of us who consume it, ice cream may not seem a likely candidate for computer control. However, the firm of H. P. Hood & Sons uses computer control in its blending operation, finding it 20,000 times as fast, and more accurate than when handled by human operators, since computer controls hold mixes within one-tenth of 1 per cent accuracy. Automation is a significant breakthrough in this industry, whose history goes back 110 years, and in baking, which is a little older. The Sara Lee bakeries use the computer too in assembling the ingredients for their goodies. To bake such cakes, Mother will have to get herself a computer.

Minneapolis-Honeywell furnished the computer for the ice-cream control; this same company delivered a system for the Celanese Corporation of America’s multimillion dollar acetyl manufacturing plant at Bay City, Texas. The new plant produces a petrochemical used in plastics, paint, synthetic rubber, dye, fibers, and other products. Going “on-stream” in 1962, the Celanese plant will produce half a billion pounds of chemicals annually.

Russia has been mentioned as active in industrial computer control. A case in point is the soda plant at Slavyansk in the Donets Basin, which was recently test-operated for a continuous period of 48 hours by computer. An unusual feature of this test was that the computer was in Kiev, almost 400 miles away. A wire link between the two cities permitted monitoring and control of the plant from Kiev in what the Russians claim as the first remote automatic operation of such a plant.

Other Soviet achievements include two large-scale automatically controlled installations. In oil-field operation at Tataria, gas and oil outputs from many wells are monitored and controlled from a central station, dropping the work force required from 600 to 100. The other installation controls irrigation servicing 9,000 acres. A desktop control handles the pumping of water from the Syr Darya River through underground pipes, and distribution to Uzbekistan cotton fields. The Russians have also designed an automatic distillation unit for the Hungarians. With an annual capacity of a million tons, the unit was installed in the large Szoeny refinery and scheduled for operation by 1962.

Refineries in the United States are also employing automatic controls in their operations. Phillips Petroleum installed a digital computer control system in its Sweeney, Texas, plant to achieve maximum efficiency in its thermal cracking process. In the first step of an experimental program, Phillips, working with Autonetics computer engineers, used a digital computer to plan optimum furnace operation. An initial 10 per cent improvement was achieved in this way, and a further 6 per cent gain resulted when a digital computer was installed on-line to operate the cracking furnace.

The Standard Oil Company of California is using an IBM 7090 in San Francisco to control its catalytic or “cat” cracking plant in El Segundo, some 450 miles away. The need for computer speed and accuracy is shown by the conditions under which the cracking plant must operate continuously with no shutdowns except for repair. Each day, two million gallons of petroleum is mixed in the cracker with the catalyst, a metallic clay. The mixing takes place at incandescent heat of 1,000° F., and the resulting inferno faces operators with more than a hundred changing factors to keep track of, a job feasible only with computer help.

Another use of computer control in the petroleum industry is that of automatic gasoline blending, as done by the Gulf Oil Corporation. A completely electronic system is in operation at Santa Fe Springs, California. The system automatically delivers the prescribed quantities of gasoline for the desired blend. In case of error or malfunction of equipment, the control alerts the human supervisor with warning lights and an audible alarm. If he does not take proper action the control system automatically shuts itself off.

From the time the war-inspired industry of synthetic rubber production began in 1940 until very recently, it has been almost entirely a manual operation. Then in 1961 Goodyear Tire & Rubber introduced computer control into the process at its Plioflex plant in Houston, Texas. Goodyear expects the new system to increase its “throughput” and also to improve the quality of the product through tighter, smoother control of the complicated operation. Other chemical processors using computer control in their plants include Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto, Union Carbide, Sun Oil, and The Texas Company.

Adept at controlling the flow of material through pipes, the computer can also control the flow of electricity through wires. An example of this application is the use of digital computers in electric-utility load-control stations. A typical installation is that of the Philadelphia Electric Company in Philadelphia, the first to be installed. Serving 3-1/2 million customers, the utility relies on a Minneapolis-Honeywell computer to control automatically and continuously the big turbine generators that supply electric power for the large industrial area. The memory of the computer stores data about the generators, transmission-line losses, operating costs, and so on. Besides controlling the production of power for most economy, the computer in its spare time performs billing operations for exchange of power carried on with Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection and Delaware Power & Light Company and Atlantic City Electric Company.

Other utilities using computer control are the Riverside Power Station of the Gulf States Utilities Company, Southern California Edison, and the Louisiana Power & Light Company’s Little Gypsy station in New Orleans.

Another industry that makes use of a continuous flow of material is now being fitted for computer control, and as a result papermakers may soon have a better product to sell. IBM has delivered a 1710 computer to Potlach Forests, Inc., in Idaho for control of a paperboard machine 500 feet long. Papermaking up to now has been more art than science because of the difficulty of controlling recipes. With the computer, Potlach expects to make better paper, have less reject material, and spend less time in changing from one product run to another.

Showing that automatic control can work just about anywhere, the English firm of Cliffe Hill Granite Company in Markfield, Leicestershire, controls its grading and batching of granite aggregate from a central location. Besides rock-crushers, cement plants like Riverside Cement Company use computer control in the United States.

Thus far most of the computer control operations we have discussed are in the continuous-processing fields of chemicals or other uniform materials. The computer is making headway in the machine shop too, although its work is less likely of notice there since the control panel is less impressive than the large machine tool it is directing. Aptly called APT, for Automatically Programmed Tools, the new technique is the brainchild of M.I.T. engineer Douglas Ross. Automatic control eliminates the need for drill jigs and other special setup tools and results in cheaper, faster, and more accurate machine work.

A coded tape, generated by a computer, controls the milling machine, drill press, or shaper more accurately than the human machinist could. In effect, the computer studies a blueprint and punches out instructions on tape that tell the machine what it is to do, how much of it, and for how long. Huge shaping and contouring machines munch chunks of metal from blanks to form them into complex three-dimensional shapes. Remington Rand UNIVAC and IBM are among the companies producing computers for this purpose. The trend is to simpler, more flexible control so that even small shops can avail themselves of the new technique. In a typical example of the savings possible with “numerical” tape control, these were the comparative costs: