“ ‘Brain working now?’ I asked.
“ ‘Working?’ he said. ‘Like a dream.’
“ ‘How does she work?’ I asked.
“ ‘Briefly,’ said Dr. Woodbury, ‘raw material comes in from the teletypes, is processed by people at that circular desk, is broken down into precincts—possibility of human error here, you know—and is transferred to Univac digital recording magnetic tape. The tapes are placed in one of the ten servos, and then translated to Univac herself. Univac compares current data with accumulated data and comes out with the answers.’ Courier bearing white slip of paper interrupted Dr. Woodbury. Dr. Woodbury scanned paper. ‘Univac predicts, on basis of one million votes counted, three hundred and ninety-eight electoral votes for Ike, sixty-eight for Stevenson, with the balance in doubt. Perfectly splendid! Right on the beam! Univac is willing to go a hundred to one for Eisenhower! And now I’ll show you Univac herself—the works—through glass, of course.’
“Went to end of room and looked through window at what seemed like dozen or more airplane engines, millions of coils and lights. ‘The brain!’ said Dr. Woodbury. ‘We have to cool her off with air.’ Quiet-looking man stepped up. ‘Meet Dr. John Mauchly,’ said Dr. Woodbury. ‘Dr. Mauchly, here, is a co-inventor of Univac.’
“ ‘Univac costs one million dollars to purchase outright,’ said Dr. Mauchly. ‘Twenty-five thousand dollars a month to rent.’ Told Dr. Mauchly I’d think it over. ‘Univac is going smoothly,’ said Dr. Mauchly.
“ ‘One thing worries me,’ said Dr. Woodbury. ‘Univac says Tennessee is going Democratic, I say Tennessee is going Republican.’ Courier arrived with United Press dispatch that Tennessee was going Republican. ‘The machine is slightly wrong,’ said Dr. Woodbury, tugging at his mustache.
“Evening wore on, machines whirred, lights flashed. On basis of 2,600,000 votes counted, Univac predicted 383 electoral votes for Eisenhower, 90 for Stevenson, 58 doubtful. On basis of 3,773,000 votes counted, Univac predicted 405 electoral votes for Eisenhower, 81 for Stevenson, 45 in doubt. Drs. Mauchly and Woodbury beamed. Courier arrived and whispered something into Dr. Woodbury’s ear. ‘The machine has goofed,’ said Dr. Woodbury. ‘Mechanical failure, but just possibly an input goof.’
“ ‘She has become persnickety about accepting some data,’ said Dr. Mauchly. ‘Often, she regurgitates unacceptable data into her post-mortem file.’
“ ‘That’s how we catch the goofs,’ said Dr. Woodbury. He was now tugging fiercely at his mustache.
“ ‘The brain is smart,’ said Dr. Mauchly, his voice like cold steel, ‘but the brain is also stupid. Stuff her with something wrong and she’ll go right ahead with it.’
“ ‘Sometimes a surprising trend disturbs her, and then she has to make a decision,’ said Dr. Woodbury. ‘Often, she says, “I will not accept this decision,” and that’s where the post-mortem file comes in.’
“ ‘Really, we make the value judgments,’ said Dr. Mauchly.
“ ‘No,’ said Dr. Woodbury, ‘we do the creation.’
“ ‘I can give her the rules,’ said Dr. Mauchly.
“ ‘I feel we are following the decision rules,’ said Dr. Woodbury. Group of anxious technicians huddled over a control board. Red lights were flashing wildly. ‘Error lights,’ said Dr. Woodbury.
“ ‘Easy to blame the machinery,’ said Dr. Mauchly. ‘Could be human failure.’
“ ‘The trouble is in the Senate,’ said Dr. Woodbury. ‘She’s goofed on the Senate.’
“Drs. Woodbury and Mauchly joined technicians at control board. I went home and listened to returns on radio. Eisenhower by landslide.”
Harding Mason
DECEMBER 6, 1958 (“RIVAL”)
AVING TOLD YOU about the giant digital computer known as I.B.M. 704 and how it has been taught to play a fairly creditable game of chess, we’d like to tell you about an even more remarkable machine, the perceptron, which, as its name implies, is capable of what amounts to original thought. The first perceptron has yet to be built, but it has been successfully simulated on a 704, and it’s only a question of time (and money) before it comes into existence. This about-to-be marvel is a lot more subtle than the 704; indeed, it strikes us as the first serious rival to the human brain ever devised, and our own brain is thoroughly dazzled by the things it’s said to do. The begetters of the prodigy are Dr. Frank Rosenblatt, of the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, and Dr. Marshall C. Yovits, of the Office of Naval Research, in Washington. Dr. Rosenblatt was passing through town recently, on his way to a consultation with Dr. Yovits, and we conned him, over a cup of coffee, into a brief exegesis of their brilliant offspring. “Our success in developing the perceptron means that for the first time a nonbiological object will achieve an organization of its external environment in a meaningful way,” Dr. Rosenblatt said. “That’s a safe definition of what the perceptron can do. My colleague disapproves of all the loose talk one hears nowadays about mechanical brains. He prefers to call our machine a self-organizing system, but, between you and me, that’s precisely what any brain is.”
Digital computers, Dr. Rosenblatt said, are equipped to solve certain problems more quickly and accurately than human beings can, but the problems must be prepared and, in effect, spoon-fed to them by specialists; being basically adding machines, the computers lack creativity. The distinctive characteristic of the perceptron is that it interacts with its environment, forming concepts that have not been made ready for it by a human agent. Biologists claim that only biological systems see, feel, and think, but the perceptron behaves as if it saw, felt, and thought. Both computers and perceptrons have so-called memories; in the latter, however, the memory isn’t a mere storehouse of deliberately selected and accumulated facts but a free, indeterminate area of association units, connecting, as nearly as possible at random, a sensory input, or eye, with a very large number of response units.
If a triangle is held up to the perceptron’s eye, the association units connected with the eye pick up the image of the triangle and convey it along a random succession of lines to the response units, where the image is registered. The next time the triangle is held up to the eye, its image will travel along the path already travelled by the earlier image. Significantly, once a particular response has been established, all the connections leading to that response are strengthened, and if a triangle of a different size and shape is held up to the perceptron, its image will be passed along the track that the first triangle took. If a square is presented, however, a new set of random lines is called into play and a new response results. The more images the perceptron is permitted to scan, the more adroit its generalizations in respect to those images become. Dr. Rosenblatt picked up a silver cream pitcher beside his coffee cup. “I recognize this as a pitcher, though I’ve never seen it before,” he said. “That process of thought may seem simple to you, but in fact it’s immensely complicated. The perceptron is able to draw subtle conclusions of that sort. It can tell the difference between a dog and a cat, though so far, according to our calculations, it wouldn’t be able to tell whether the dog was to the left or right of the cat. We still have to teach it depth perception and refinements of judgment.”
Of what practical use, we asked, would the perceptron be? “At the moment, none whatever,” Dr. Rosenblatt said cheerfully. “Someday we may find it useful to send one out into space to take in impressions for us. In these matters, you know, use follows invention. Something called an Interdisciplinary Conference on Self-Organizing Systems has been scheduled for May. It’ll bring together biologists, psychologists, physicists, and social scientists from all over, and we’ll see what happens when they all get to thinking and talking about perceptrons.” What, we asked, wasn’t the perceptron capable of? Dr. Rosenblatt threw up his hands. “Love,” he said. “Hope. Despair. Human nature, in short. If we don’t understand the human sex drive, why should we expect a machine to?”
Brendan Gill
MAY 30, 1953 (“F
ROZEN”)
E MENTIONED A while ago the case of a housewife who bought a large home freezer and, while attending a night-school course in Freezer Management, learned that the best way to clean spinach before cooking and freezing it is to give it a whirl in a washing machine. Now we’ve been to see the conductor of the course and have gathered further information on the multiple uses to which home appliances can be put. The course in Freezer Management is offered as part of the night-school curriculum of the Long Island Agricultural and Technical Institute, in Farmingdale, a branch of the State University of New York, and is taught by an ingenious fellow named George G. Cook, who is forty and the holder of a B.S. and M.S. in agriculture and education from Cornell. As we entered the classroom, he was winding up a demonstration of the proper way to prepare a Baked Alaska. “As far as I know, this is the first course in Freezer Management ever offered,” he told us, tucking the Baked Alaska away in one of nine gleaming white freezers scattered about the room. “I’ve been interested in food preservation through freezing ever since 1946, and I like to pass along to my classes some of the little tricks I’ve picked up over the years. For example, I recommend the washing machine not only for spinach but for beet greens, turnip greens, kale, and Swiss chard. The swirling action of the machine gets the dirt off the undersides of the leaves faster and more thoroughly than hand washing. I also recommend that the housewife spin-dry the vegetables before removing them from the washer. Less mess. As for peas, I suggest that they be shucked by boiling them in the pods for a minute and then passing them through a clothes wringer.”
Cook’s next self-imposed chore was to bone a turkey, and as he boned he predicted to us that the freezer would shortly become as indispensable to the kitchen as the refrigerator and stove. Over five million home freezers are already in operation throughout the country, he said, and the eating habits of Homo americanus are, as a result, being radically altered. “Back in the old, pre-freezer days,” he explained, “the usual thing was to buy a ham, have baked ham one night, sliced cold ham the next, ham hash or ham loaf on the third night, and maybe a ham-bone soup on the fourth. Ham, ham, ham! Nowadays, you can have ham one night and freeze the remainder till you’re good and ready for it.” The key to successful freezer management, he went on, giving the turkey a terrible wrench, is to buy a big enough freezer. “Allow five to six cubic feet per family member,” he said. “Since the cost of stocking it once a year is prohibitive, unless you raise your own vegetables, stock it as often as you can with as much as you can. But stock! Stock! Bake eight pies in one oven heating and freeze seven. Or eight loaves of bread. Freezing bread actually makes it taste fresher, and I advise the women in my classes to buy day-old bread, pies, cakes, and sweet rolls at bakeries for a few cents off, then freeze them. A dollar saved is a dollar earned. People with freezers stop throwing away leftovers. Do you know what happens to waffles that don’t get eaten? They get put into moistureproof bags and frozen—frozen, do you hear?”
We may have looked slightly ill, for Mr. Cook hurriedly left leftovers to speak instead of his classes, which average thirty-two members and meet for two hours one evening a week for twelve weeks. There’s a registration fee of four dollars and a laboratory fee of two dollars for the materials used; otherwise, the course is free. He provides all the food that his pupils prepare, except meat, and the students get their two dollars’ worth of food back the last night of the course. The price of meat being what it is, he fears that if he were to give it away, a certain number of artful dodgers might take his course merely in order to pick up a nice cut of beef. His counsel in class ranges all the way from blanching food to the use of dry ice in case of power failure. A negative advantage of home freezers, he said, as he got the turkey ready for its moistureproof bag, is that they keep housewives out of grocery stores, where they’re subject to impulse buying. A positive advantage is that housewives not only are spared the horror of becoming hopeless impulse buyers but don’t get trichinosis. “Matter of fact,” Cook said, “my wife always leaves blankets and winter clothes in our freezer for forty-eight hours before storing them for the summer. That’s guaranteed to kill moths in all stages. Think what an advantage that is! Furthermore, the freezer is an ideal place in which to put valuable papers. The thick walls of the freezer make it practically fireproof. Or hide your cash and securities in a frozen-food container at the bottom of the freezer, and how is a thief to find them? He’s not going to empty the whole darned thing looking for them—not with frosty haddock fillets and ice-cold succotash sticking to his fingers. Safe as a bank.”
Whitney Balliett
DECEMBER 25, 1954 (“MAGNETIC FORCE”)
E’VE BEEN UP to Columbia to attend a class in “Adventures in Jazz,” a course sponsored by the Institute of Arts and Sciences and conducted by a jazz mandarin named Sidney Gross. He meets his pupils in a room in the School of Journalism Building, to which we repaired a few minutes before classtime, which we knew to be 7:30 P.M. The room had blackboards on three walls and was furnished with a baby-grand piano, a record-player, and Mr. Gross, a handsome fellow with dark hair and piercing light-green eyes. We pressed him for a thumbnail autobiography, and he replied that he was born in London thirty-nine years ago; became a student of jazz at twelve, on hearing a Jimmy Dorsey recording of “Praying the Blues”; studied the violin for two years, then switched to the ukulele, and then to the guitar; and in 1939 joined the R.A.F. as a musician. “During the Battle of Britain, we used to send the pilots up full of jazz and hot rhythms,” he said. “After the war, I started a series of weekly jazz concerts at the Adelphi Theatre, in London. We took in more money there than the London Philharmonic did. I came to this country five years ago. Been fooling around in radio and records ever since.”
Mr. Gross told us that his course, the first of its kind ever offered by Columbia, has an enrollment of sixty-five students of all ages and occupations, including a real-estate man, a dentist, and a female anesthetist. The course lasts only ten weeks and provides no credits toward a degree, but Mr. Gross feels sure that every college in the country will eventually have to come to terms with jazz, and take it as seriously as history or French. A feature of his course is guests, who perform before the class. “Tonight the star performer will be the drummer Louie Bellson,” Mr. Gross said. “I’ve rented a whole drum kit for him. Excuse me while I go fetch it.” He scooted out of the room to fetch the drum kit, and by the time he had returned, the room was jammed with students. After greeting them, he read aloud from a paper on jazz that had been contributed by a member of the class named Walda Klay. We noted in the reading such statements as “Jazz is a sixth sense,” “Jazz has inescapable magnetic force,” and “Jazz is worth living, loving, and listening to.” At the end of the reading, the class burst into applause, and Mr. Gross asked Walda Klay to stand. A girl with a blond horsetail got up, bowed to Mr. Gross, and hurriedly resumed her seat.
Mr. Gross announced that the topic of the evening would be bebop. “In the evolution of life, people often reach out too far too suddenly,” he said. “That is what happened to jazz in 1941, when bebop was being conceived. Among our guests tonight is Nat Hentoff, the New York editor of Down Beat. Nat, will you come up and say a few words?” Mr. Hentoff, a tall, shy-appearing man, walked to the front of the room and shook hands with Mr. Gross. “Tell the class which way jazz is heading, Nat,” Mr. Gross said.
“Jazz is heading in several different directions at once,” Mr. Hentoff said, not at all disapprovingly. “One of these directions is, I believe, a search for more form.”
A student raised his hand and inquired, “Mr. Hentoff, do you think the West Coast modern movement will become as important as the Chicago school was?”
“The so-called West Coast movement doesn’t exist,” Mr. Hentoff said. “It’s no different from jazz anywhere else.”
“What about Turk Murphy and his San Francisco jazz?” Mr. Gross asked.
“All that people like Turk Murphy are doing out there is copying
the records of people like Jelly Roll Morton, right down to the surface scratches,” Mr. Hentoff replied. “What happens to revivalists is that they tend to get homesick for places they’ve never been.”
Another guest, Thelonius Monk, was introduced as a pianist, a composer, and an early booster of bebop. At Mr. Gross’s urging, Mr. Monk sat down at the piano and struck a few chords. “Those are old-style chords,” he said. “Now here’s a new-style chord—a G seventh.” He banged the keys smartly. “That’s what the chords we’re using nowadays sound like,” he said. “I’ll play a chorus of ‘Just You, Just Me,’ and see how you like it.” When he finished the piece, the class applauded wildly. In rapid succession, Mr. Gross introduced some more new-style guests: Oscar Pettiford, who came forward bearing a bass fiddle; Jimmy Hamilton, who bore a clarinet; and the great Louie Bellson, who stepped into the classroom just as his name was spoken and, taking off his overcoat, seated himself like a banker back of the rented drums. Mr. Gross said that Bellson, Monk, Pettiford, and Hamilton would play “Just You, Just Me,” and that still another guest, the poet Langston Hughes, would then read from his works certain passages having to do with jazz in general and the birth of bebop in particular. “Give us a C,” Hamilton called out to Monk. Monk gave his companions a C, and they were off. The music slammed back and forth, louder and louder, inside the long classroom, and Professor Gross sat at his desk and beamed.
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