The Information - James Gleick [127]
From a behavioristic point of view, the machine acts as though it were thinking. It has always been considered that skillful chess play requires the reasoning faculty. If we regard thinking as a property of external actions rather than internal method the machine is surely thinking.
Nonetheless, as of 1952 he estimated that it would take three programmers working six months to enable a large-scale computer to play even a tolerable amateur game. “The problem of a learning chess player is even farther in the future than a preprogrammed type. The methods which have been suggested are obviously extravagantly slow. The machine would wear out before winning a single game.”♦ The point, though, was to look in as many directions as possible for what a general-purpose computer could do.
He was exercising his sense of whimsy, too. He designed and actually built a machine to do arithmetic with Roman numerals: for example, IV times XII equals XLVIII. He dubbed this THROBAC I, an acronym for Thrifty Roman-numeral Backward-looking Computer. He created a “mind-reading machine” meant to play the child’s guessing game of odds and evens. What all these flights of fancy had in common was an extension of algorithmic processes into new realms—the abstract mapping of ideas onto mathematical objects. Later, he wrote thousands of words on scientific aspects of juggling♦—with theorems and corollaries—and included from memory a quotation from E. E. Cummings: “Some son-of-a-bitch will invent a machine to measure Spring with.”
In the 1950s Shannon was also trying to design a machine that would repair itself.♦ If a relay failed, the machine would locate and replace it. He speculated on the possibility of a machine that could reproduce itself, collecting parts from the environment and assembling them. Bell Labs was happy for him to travel and give talks on such things, often demonstrating his maze-learning machine, but audiences were not universally delighted. The word “Frankenstein” was heard. “I wonder if you boys realize what you’re toying around with there,” wrote a newspaper columnist in Wyoming.
What happens if you switch on one of these mechanical computers but forget to turn it off before you leave for lunch? Well, I’ll tell you. The same thing would happen in the way of computers in America that happened to Australia with jack rabbits. Before you could multiply 701,945,240 by 879,030,546, every family in the country would have a little computer of their own.…
Mr. Shannon, I don’t mean to knock your experiments, but frankly I’m not remotely interested in even one computer, and I’m going to be pretty sore if a gang of them crowd in on me to multiply or divide or whatever they do best.♦
Two years after Shannon raised his warning flag about the bandwagon, a younger information theorist, Peter Elias, published a notice complaining about a paper titled “Information Theory, Photosynthesis, and Religion.”♦ There was, of course, no such paper. But there had been papers on information theory, life, and topology; information theory and the physics of tissue damage; and clerical systems; and psychopharmacology; and geophysical data interpretation; and crystal structure; and melody. Elias, whose father had worked for Edison as an engineer, was himself a serious specialist—a major contributor to coding theory. He mistrusted the softer, easier, platitudinous work flooding across disciplinary boundaries. The typical paper, he said, “discusses the surprisingly close relationship between the vocabulary and conceptual framework of information theory and that of psychology (or genetics, or linguistics, or psychiatry, or business organization).… The concepts of structure, pattern, entropy, noise, transmitter, receiver, and code are (when properly interpreted) central to both.” He declared this to be larceny.