2nd
DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN BALL.
I watched a young woman present a machine with an extremely complex problem in ballistics involving hundreds of variables. At once lights on a control panel twinkled and winked as the computer checked to see that all equipment was operating properly. Then it set briskly to work. Magnetic tapes spun in their shiny glass-and-steel vacuum cabinets, the high-speed printer muttered. Suddenly the machine stopped and the electric typewriter wrote: “Last entry improperly stated!”
A little embarrassed, the young operator corrected her error, and the machine started again. Four minutes later it gave an answer that had required several million individual calculations.“This is a wonderful machine” the girl said, “but it makes you shiver sometimes, especially when you give it a wrong figure. Once in a while we give it an incorrect figure on purpose—just to see it sneer at us.”
Modern Mechanix - THINKING MACHINES ARE GETTING SMARTER (1959)
((and the lonely people are getting lonelier.))
THE FIRST INSTANCE OF MACHINE TRANSLATION-INDUCED LOLS??
In an early experiment, the computer was asked to translate the English saying “Out of sight, out of mind,” into Russian. The result was startling: “Invisible and insane.”
PLUS BONUS “oh brave new world!” FACTS:
Most commercial and scientific computer systems are huge affairs that fill a good-sized room which must be air-conditioned and dust-free. The largest digital computers cost from $500,000 to $4,000,000 each and yet they are being produced on an assembly-line basis by several companies.
