The end of the beginning ...

The beginning ...

A digital computer can usually be regarded as consisting of three parts:

Store.

Executive unit.

Control.

The store is a store of information, and corresponds to the human computer's paper, whether this is the paper on which he does his calculations or that on which his book of rules is printed. In so far as the human computer does calculations in his head a part of the store will correspond to his memory.

The executive unit is the part which carries out the various individual operations involved in a calculation. What these individual operations are will vary from machine to machine. Usually fairly lengthy operations can be done such as ‘Multiply 3540675445 by 7076345687’ but in some machines only very simple ones such as ‘Write down 0’ are possible.

We have mentioned that the ‘book of rules’ supplied to the computer is replaced in the machine by a part of the store. It is then called the ‘table of instructions’. It is the duty of the control to see that these instructions are obeyed correctly and in the right order. The control is so constructed that this necessarily happens.

The information in the store is usually broken up into packets of moderately small size. In one machine, for instance, a packet might consist of ten decimal digits. Numbers are assigned to the parts of the store in which the various packets of information are stored, in some systematic manner. A typical instruction might say—

‘Add the number stored in position 6809 to that in 4302 and put the result back into the latter storage position’. 

A. M. TURING

Mind, Volume LIX, Issue 236, October 1950, Pages 433–460, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433

Published: 01 October 1950

The end of the beginning ...

In 1950, mathematician Alan Turing argued that it’s a waste of time to ask whether machines can think. Instead, he proposed a game: a player has two written conversations, one with another human and one with a machine. Based on the exchanges, the human has to decide which is which.

This “imitation game” would serve as a test for artificial intelligence. But how would we program machines to play it?

Turing suggested that we teach them, just like children. We could instruct them to follow a series of rules, while enabling them to make minor tweaks based on experience.

For computers, the learning process just looks a little different.

First, we need to feed them lots of data: anything from pictures of everyday objects to details of banking transactions.

Then we have to tell the computers what to do with all that information.

Until they decide to do it for themselves ...