Mind over Computer 15
of symptoms and it will spit out a range of possible alternative diagnoses with probability weightings and suggested further tests. Similar systems are widely deployed in other fields, to build racing cars, design dams and fight crime. Even the game consoles in our living rooms implement artificial intelligence to make the aliens more believable and our hearts pump faster.
Origin of Computers
Alan Turing effectively invented the modern day computer in a paper he submitted to the London Mathematical Society in the summer of 1936. He was not the first person to come up with the idea — that honor probably goes to Charles Babbage — but he was the first to fully understand its power. When we talk about computers today we mean machines, but it is worth noting computers in Turing’s time were more often humans using pencil and paper. The mechanical computers before
Turing were elementary at best.
Rudimentary calculating machines were developed in Greece, Persia and China as far back as the Ming Dynasty. An astrolabe recovered froma ship wreck off the Greek Island of Antikythera had cogs and gears and could accurately predict the motions of the sun and planets. Many
Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, Computer History Museum, CA
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