| | The Origins of Machine Intelligence | [T]he idea of mechanical calculating engines had been around for a while. In the seventeenth century, Pascal and Leibniz designed machines to perform fixed operations (addition and multiplication). These machines had no memory, however, and were not, in modern parlance, programmable. The first human to conceive of the immense computing potential of machinery was the Londoner Charles Babbage (1792-1871)... His first machine, the "Difference Engine", could generate mathematical tables of many kinds by the "method of differences". But before any model of the "D.E." had been built, Babbage became obsessed with a much more revolutionary idea: his "Analytical Engine". Rather immodestly, he wrote. "The course through which I arrived at it was the most entangled and perplexed which probably ever occupied the human mind." Unlike any previously designed machine, the A.E. was to possess both a "store" (memory) and a "mill" (calculating and decision-making unit). These units were to be built of thousands of intricate geared cylinders interlocked in incredibly complex ways. Babbage had a vision of numbers swirling in and out of the mill under control of a program contained in punched cards — an idea inspired by the Jacquard loom, a card-controlled loom that wove amazingly complex patterns. Babbage's brilliant but ill-fated Countess friend, Lady Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron), poetically commented that "the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves." Unfortunately, her use of the present tense was misleading, for no A.E. was ever built, and Babbage died a bitterly disappointed man. Lady Lovelace, no less than Babbage, was profoundly aware that with the invention of the Analytical Engine, mankind was flirting with mechanized intelligence — particularly if the Engine were capable of "eating its own tail" (...when a machine reaches in and alters its own stored program). In an 1842 memoir, she wrote that the A.E. "might act upon other things besides number." While Babbage dreamt of creating a chess or tic-tac-toe automaton, she suggested that his Engine, with pitches and harmonies coded into its spinning cylinders, "might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent." In nearly the same breath, however, she cautions that "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform." Though she well understood the power of artificial computation, Lady Lovelace was skeptical about the artificial creation of intelligence. However, could her keen insight allow her to dream of the potential that would be opened up with the taming of electricity? | —Douglas R Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid | Indexes/06 |
1 comments:
In recent par, but she warned that "there is no analytical engine camouflage, no matter from what it can do whatever it wants, we know how to order, a performance."
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