Giant brains; or, Machines that think

Recently there has been a good deal of news about strange giant machines that can handle information with vast speed and skill. They calculate and they reason. Some of them are...

As everyone knows, it is not always easy to think. By _thinking_, we mean computing, reasoning, and other handling of information. By _information_ we mean collections of ideas—...

By designing Simon, we shall see how we can put together physical equipment for handling information in such a way as to get a very simple mechanical brain. At every point in th...

For the equipment inside Simon, we could choose either electronic tubes or relays. We choose relays, although they are slower, because it is easier to explain circuits using rel...

When we think of counting, we usually think of saying softly to ourselves “one, two, three, four, ···.” This is a good way to find the total of a small group of objects. But whe...

Reading and writing are operations perhaps not strictly of reasoning but of _translating_ from one language to another. Basically these operations take in a mark in one language...

In the previous chapter we talked about machines that move information expressed as holes in cards. In this chapter we shall talk about machines that move information expressed...

One of the first giant brains to be finished was the machine in the Computation Laboratory at Harvard University called the _IBM Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator_. This...

Another of the giant brains that has begun to work is named _ENIAC_. This name comes from the initial letters of the full name, _Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator_....

intermediate results that must be stored for a time before combining. The Ballistic Research Laboratories, however, contracted for extensions to Eniac to provide more memory and...

In 1946, Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York finished two _general-purpose relay calculators_—mechanical brains. They were twins. One was shipped in July 1946 to the Nationa...

So far we have talked about mechanical brains that are mathematicians. They are fond of numbers; their main work is with numbers; and the other kinds of thinking they do are sec...

In the previous chapters we have described four giant mechanical brains finished by the end of 1946: Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Differential Analyzer No. 2, Harvard...

The pen is mightier than the sword, it is often said. And if this is true, then the pen with a motor may be mightier than the sword with a motor.

It is often easier for men to create a device than to guide it well afterwards: it is often easier for a scientist to study his science than to study the results for good or evi...

The Computation Laboratory of Harvard University finished during 1947 a second large relay calculator, called the Aiken Mark II Relay Calculator. This machine is alluded to brie...

BLOCH, R. M., R. V. D. CAMPBELL, and M. ELLIS, The Logical Design of the Raytheon Computer, _Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation_, vol. 3, no. 24, Oct. 1948, pp. 2...

Some of the problems that mechanical brains can solve, some of the methods for controlling them to solve problems, and some of the implications of mechanical brains for future p...