Word: forms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1950
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Since at present only a small percentage of the Chinese can read, they cannot be educated into the ways of democracy, and that form of government will be impossible for several generations. A regime, however, which is not oriented toward Russia may easily evolve, Reischauer concluded, for if communists do not make a strong China quickly, there is a good chance they will lose it forever...
Bessie and her children do not stop and wait. They accept not only a flood of numbers but also elaborate instructions (often in the form of holes in a paper tape). When all the facts are in, the operator presses a starting button-and the machine quickly does the rest...
...relays or vacuum tubes acting like swift relays) obey only two commands: yes or no-i.e., an electrical signal or no signal. So all information fed into the machines has to be predigested into yes-or-no binary arithmetic. Any number, however large, can be expressed in this form. So can elaborate equations like those from the fission problem done for Princeton by the I.B.M. machine. Even languages can be translated in binary numbers. (One way: making different numbers stand for each character, syllable or word.) Any sort of information, once the mathematicians go to work...
Their opponents retort that computers are mere tools that do only what they are told. Professor Aiken, a leader of the conservatives, admits that the machines show, in rudimentary form at least, all the attributes of human thinking except one: imagination. Aiken cannot define imagination, but he is sure that it exists and that no machine, however clever, is likely to have...
...Mark III, soon to be delivered to the Navy, has the best memory of any machine so far. Its memory is housed in fast-spinning aluminum cylinders whose surfaces are coated with black magnetic material (see cut). On the black surfaces, its electrical signals print long numbers in the form of magnetized dots. When the cylinder makes its next turn, the dots can be read off again in a small fraction of a second. They can be destroyed, replaced with other numbers or retained permanently...