Machine Intelligence 7 - AITopics

PREFACE
'Machine Intelligence' has now been actively studied for several years and
has attracted the interest and support of some extremely able men. The
problem I wish to pose to you is this. At this particular moment in time, is it
reasonable to divert intellectual resource into an enterprise which, if I may
presume to say so, has been disappointingly slow to produce significant
results There is no doubt at all of the rapid development of computers and of
their associated software, but is this enterprise of yours part of the main
stream development of computers, or is it merely an interesting, but irrelevant,
side line
Perhaps I may begin by speaking briefly about the developments which
have taken place in the machines themselves during the last few years. I
think it is worth reminding ourselves that thirty-five years ago, at the beginning
of the last war, virtually the whole of engineering, of commerce and of
administration depended on the use of hand-operated calculating machines
and very complicated manual operations performed with simple instruments
(like pens) which had not changed significantly since the time of classical
Athens. Nevertheless, a few punch card machines, a few desk calculators,
and a few very good mathematical tables had speeded up ordinary computation
by a factor of four or five hundred times as compared with the speed
which could be achieved by the ancient astronomers or even by Kepler
himself. May I remind you that he had to work out all his original calculations
by brute force and that it was relatively late in his life that he was able
to exploit the new mathematical tables which had just been invented by
Briggs. Society as we knew it forty years ago depended entirely on the
achievement of a couple of millenia in increasing the speed of ordinary
arithmetical operations.
The first computers to be installed in Cambridge, Manchester and Toronto
some twenty years ago were about five hundred times as fast as an ordinary
operator using calculating machines and log tables. In other words, the
achievements of a millenium were paralleled by the achievements of a decade.
Since then we have had Mercury and Atlas. No one can dispute that Atlas
was a thousand times as fast as the very old original Mark One machine
which we were so proud of twenty years ago. We. are about to instal a
machine in Manchester which will be twenty times as powerful as Atlas.
How much further this process can go is far from clear, because, of course,