When Charles Babbage Played Chess With the Original Mechanical Turk (ieee.org) 30
IEEE Spectrum is publishing a six-part series exploring the human history of AI. the_newsbeagle writes: The 19th century British engineer Charles Babbage is sometimes called the father of the computer. But his first design for a massive computing machine, a contraption called the Difference Engine that had some 25,000 parts, was just a giant calculator intended to handle logarithmic tables. It wasn't until he began designing his first Analytical Engine that he began to dream of a smart machine that could handle more general-purpose computations.
This short essay argues that Babbage's creative leap was inspired by an early example of AI hype: A supposed chess-playing machine called The Turk that had astounded onlookers throughout the courts of Europe. Babbage played two games against the Turk, and lost both.
This short essay argues that Babbage's creative leap was inspired by an early example of AI hype: A supposed chess-playing machine called The Turk that had astounded onlookers throughout the courts of Europe. Babbage played two games against the Turk, and lost both.
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Whether Babbage believed the Turk was real is irrelevant to whether the idea stimulated his imagination. The history of AI is littered with fraudulent and exaggerated claims, but the state of the art moves on
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He was never going to make a true computer from hard metal
I dunno, it seems to me that relays would have worked just fine.
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Not in the 1820s when he first designed the difference engine, they really did not exist in a form useful for digital computing. In 1837 Davy invented a kind of relay that pulled a needle into mercury solution to close contact... for general purpose computing you'd need the kind of relay that would pass current from one contact through either of two contacts, one when opened and another closed. Railroads had the right stuff in 1860s and onwards... a bit late for old Babbage stuck in mechanical mode
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Well, yes electo-mechanical binary computer came first: Zuse in the late 1930s did build (with two students) one with all custom parts out of sheet metal. However, he still had the advantage of many kinds of technology that didn't exist in the early 19th century. Even standardized screws and bolts and a way to make them happened in the 1860s.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.188... [arxiv.org]
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The Babbage machine would have worked fine if he or his workers would have worked more precise.
There are working Babbage replicas!!
The first computers build by Konrad Zuse were based one relays, and worked fine, too.
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He was never going to make a true computer from hard metal- and he knew this.
I highly recommend if you can when you are in the San Jose Area and have a free afternoon you can go see a full implementation of the Babbage machine in operation at the Computer History Museum. They say there is one in London as well.
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anybody who uses the term "sheeple" is a fucking idiot.
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Anyone who uses the term "syphilitic wanker" probably doesn't know how you catch syphilis.
Robot narratives (Score:5, Insightful)
Western narrations about artificial intelligence are largely based upon the myths of either Galatea (think Pinocchio, the construct that becomes human) or Prometheus (Frankenstein, the dangers of bringing god-like power to humans).
However, the most realistic form of AI that we're going to interact with in the near future, works more like the Mechanical Turk: humans trying to fool humans into thinking that the puppet is life-like and has agency of it's own, while they pull the strings in the shadows.
In these times of Siris and Alexas, which largely are glorified chat bots scripted to make them look more intelligent than they are, it would be great if we had more stories approaching the subject from this angle. The Wizard of Oz is one such history, with it's "don't mind the man behind the curtain" is a good, well know one. I'd want to see many more modern examples of this story.
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However, the most realistic form of AI that we're going to interact with in the near future, works more like the Mechanical Turk: humans trying to fool humans into thinking that the puppet is life-like and has agency of it's own, while they pull the strings in the shadows.
You're not wrong. However, with neural networks and experience based learning, we are in fact moving ever closer to ultimate goal: giving agency to a machine. The real problem right now is that we don't really know the underlying concept that gives rise to agency. It might be a hundred years until we finally crack it but in the mean time we are going to make some badass puppets that eliminate many jobs previously relegated to humans.
Today's Turk... (Score:1)
Today's Turk is called "AI", "cloud", "machine learning", etc. All complete bullshit. There is no AI. If there is, it's not in any way accessible to anyone outside of some secret research project with private technology hundreds of years into the future.
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so in other words you know literally nothing about those technologies and are just mad because you misinterpreted the terminology. cool. way to out yourself as a complete ignoramus.
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Perhaps you want to grasp what AI actually means. A starting point would be this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]