Two Early Visionaries

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Two Early Visionaries

• Vannevar Bush
• Alan Turing

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Vannevar Bush

• many consider Bush to be the Godfather of our
  wired age often making reference to his 1945
  essay, "As We May Think.

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the first differential analyzer

• In 1919, Bush left Tufts and went to MIT's
  electrical engineering department. By the 1930's
  Bush was working on analog computers. These were
  large mechanical devices that looked quite
  different than today's digital machines. They
  actually used large gears and other mechanical
  parts to solve equations. In 1931, he completed
  the first differential analyzer-a machine that
  was used to solve differential equations

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microfilm

• Bush also worked on developing machines that
  would automate human thinking. Specialization in
  just about every field of academia was creating a
  glut of information. Something was needed to help
  sort through the growing store of accumulated
  knowledge. In the 1930' s microfilm, which had
  been around for nearly a century, was growing in
  popularity as a storage device, especially among
  librarians. Bush, a photography enthusiast, was
  quite interested in this resurgent technology. He
  proposed to build a machine for the FBI that
  could review 1,000 fingerprints a minute. They
  turned him down. But he continued to pursue his
  latest vision.

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The rapid selector

• Bush called his device a rapid selector. It would
  be housed in a desk and could store huge amounts
  of information on microfilm. The user could
  rapidly select documents which would then be
  projected on screen. In the late 1930's, Bush
  oversaw the building of four rapid selectors.
  They were plagued with technical problems and
  hindered by the state of current technology, but
  he was among the very first to attempt to build a
  personal information processor, and these early
  experiences provided a solid base for his
  landmark article, "As We May Think."

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Bush's 1931 Differential Analyzer
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the "military-industrial complex"

• Before the war, Bush had been the architect of
  groundbreaking analog computing projects at MIT.
  In June 1940 he convinced Franklin Delano
  Roosevelt to give him funding and political
  support to create a new kind of collaborative
  relationship between the military, industry, and
  academic researcherswithout congressional, or
  nearly any other, oversight. His influence, and
  the size of this new collaboration, grew
  phenomenally over the next five years. The result
  was named the "military-industrial complex" by
  Dwight Eisenhower.

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the "iron triangle"

• but this structure is perhaps more aptly called
  the "iron triangle" of self-perpetuating
  military, industrial, and academic relationships.
  The iron triangle had a decisive role in the
  history of new media (funding and shaping many
  important projects) as well as in Bush's personal
  history

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Bushs post war vision

• His vision of how technology could lead toward
  understanding and away from destruction was a
  primary inspiration for the postwar research that
  lead to the development of new media

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As We May Think

• In his article, Bush described a theoretical
  machine he called a "memex," which was to enhance
  human memory by allowing the user to store and
  retrieve documents linked by associations. This
  associative linking was very similar to what is
  known today as hypertext. Indeed, Ted Nelson who
  later did pioneering work with hypertext credited
  Bush as his main influence

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Memex
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Memex Monitors
Bushs design for The Memexs monitors anticipates
graphics programs and digital sketch pads
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Bushs super-secretary anticipates voice
recognition

• This machine
• Takes dictation
• Types it
• Talks back if author wanted to review what he had
  said

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Bushs head camera

• This camera anticipates current mini-cam recorders

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"It is earlier than we think"

• Vannevar Bush died on June 30, 1974, years before
  the Internet became widely popular or the World
  Wide Web even existed. With the growing
  popularity of the Internet many now look back
  through its history and see Bush as a visionary.
  Even when Bush was alive he seemed to always be
  looking toward the future, or perhaps he saw the
  present a little differently than most othershe
  was fond of saying, "It is earlier than we think"

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Bushs Cultural Impact

• His ideas paved the way for
• Computer science
• Hypertext (html)
• The Internet
• A revolution in Cognitive psychology
• Bush is the Godfather of our wired age

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Alan Turing
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Turings importance

• He developed the Colossus computers
• The Turing machine
• Anticipated the field of artificial intelligence
• Anticipated computer programming
• Anticipated interactive computing

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Turing vs. Bush

• Bushs work with computational machines was
  conceived from ideas bound to early technology
  such as microfilming, hence he anticipates the
  analog computer
• Bush built machines that didnt work all that
  well
• Turings work with computational machines was
  conceived in mathematical and linguistic terms,
  hence he anticipates the digital computer.
• Turing theorized mathematically and did not build
  machines

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Can Machines Think?

• This is the question underlying Turings essay on
  Computing Machinery and Intelligence.
• His answer I believe that at the end of the
  century the use of words and general educated
  opinion will have altered so much that one will
  be able to speak of machines thinking without
  expecting to be contradicted.
• He was right!

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"On Computable Numbers"

• In the development of the computer, theory
  preceded practice. The manifesto of the new
  electronic order of things was a paper ("On
  Computable Numbers") published by the
  mathematician and logician A. M. Turing in 1936

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A logic machine now called the Turing machine

• Turing set out the nature and theoretical
  limitations of logic machines before a single
  fully programmable computer had been built. What
  Turing provided was a symbolic description,
  revealing only the logical structure and saying
  nothing about the realization of that structure
  On relays, vacuum tubes, or transistors.
• A Turing machine, as his description came to be
  called, exists only on paper as a set of
  specifications, but no computer built in the
  intervening half century has surpassed these
  specifications all have at most the computing
  power of Turing machines.

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"Computing Machinery and Intelligence."

• His 1936 work was a forbidding forest of symbols
  and theorems, accessible only to specialists.
• This later (1950) paper was a popular polemic, in
  which Turing stated his conviction that computers
  were capable of imitating human intelligence
  perfectly and that indeed they would do so by the
  year 2000

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Artificial intelligence

• This paper too has served as a manifesto for a
  group of computer specialists dedicated to
  realizing Turing's claim by creating what they
  call "artificial intelligence," a computer that
  thinks.

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Turings cultural impact

• Inventors, like explorers, have a right to
  extravagant claims.
• Edison had said that the record player would
  revolutionize education the same claim was made
  for radio and, of course, television.
• Turing's claim has had a greater significance.
• Turing was not simply exaggerating the service
  his machine could perform. (Does a machine that
  imitates human beings perform any useful service
  at all? We are not running short of human
  beings.)
• He was instead explaining the meaning of the
  computer for our age.
• A defining technology defines or redefines man's
  role in relation to nature.
• By promising (or threatening) to replace man, the
  computer is giving us a new definition of man, as
  an "information processor," and of nature, as
  "information to be processed.

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AI

• Artificial Intelligence refers to a broad range
  of applications that exhibit human intelligence
  and behavior including robots, expert systems,
  voice recognition, natural and foreign language
  processing.
• It also implies the ability to learn or adapt
  through experience

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Shakey, the robot
Developed in 1969 by the Stanford Research
Institute, Shakey was the First full-mobile robot
with artificial intelligence. Shakey is seven
feet tall and was named after its shaky actions.
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cybernetics

• The comparative study of human and machine
  processes in order to understand their
  similarities and differences.
• It often refers to machines that imitate human
  behavior

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Norbert Weiner
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Weiners book

• Wiener had an extraordinarily wide range of
  interests and contributed to many areas in
  addition to those we have mentioned above
  including communication theory, cybernetics (a
  term he coined), quantum theory and during World
  War II he worked on gunfire control. It is
  probably this latter work which motivated his
  invention of the new area of cybernetics which he
  described in Cybernetics or, Control and
  Communication in the Animal and the Machine
  (1948).

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Hans Freudenthal comments on Wieners cultural
impact

• While studying anti-aircraft fire control, Wiener
  may have conceived the idea of considering the
  operator as part of the steering mechanism and of
  applying to him such notions as feedback and
  stability, which had been devised for mechanical
  systems and electrical circuits. ... As time
  passed, such flashes of insight were more
  consciously put to use in a sort of biological
  research ... Cybernetics has contributed to
  popularising a way of thinking in communication
  theory terms, such as feedback, information,
  control, input, output, stability, homeostasis,
  prediction, and filtering.

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The end
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