Chapter 14: Minds, Machines, and Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
(63 cards)
Who is Blaise Pascal?
A French mathematician, inventor, and philosopher. As a child, he often watched his tax-collector father spend laborious hours calculating complicated accounts by hand, and as a youth he was sometimes recruited to help out.
What did Pascal’s invent?
consisted of a row of ten-toothed cogwheels, arranged so that each complete revolution of a wheel on the right produced a rotation of one tooth (one-tenth of a revolution) in the wheel to its left.
What did he call his machine?
A Pascaline
How did it work?
The “addition” of ten units of movement in any wheel resulted in a “carry” of one unit on the wheel to its left. Numerals attached to the wheels enabled the reading and recording of the results.
What is artificial intelligence?
Historically, the Pascaline stands as one of the first machines deliberately designed and built to exhibit what we now call AI, the capacity of a mechanical device to perform operations that replicate or imitate human thought processes and other intellectual behaviours.
What did Pascal declare about his machine?
he emphasized that it “does nothing which can allow us to say the tit has will” Therefore, he went on to declare in one of his most famous statements: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of…. We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.”
For Pascal, matters of emotion and the will operate how?
operate independently of, and sometimes antagonistically to, the cold voice of reason, became the main differentiators between minds and machines. in various forms, this reservation continues to be expressed today by some of the participants in the field of AI.
What is binary arithmetic?
While he was inventing his calculator and developing the infinitesimal calculus, Leibniz also came up with the idea of binary arithmetic - the representation of all numbers by just ones and zeros.
Who is Charles Babbage?
The next pioneer in developing intelligent machines was a true intellectual heir to Leibniz in more ways than one. He was the precocious son of a wealthy English banker, studied German and mathematics on his own and as a teenager mastered Leibniz’s German-language presentation of the calculus.
What is the difference engine?
Babbage’s imagined machine, which he called a difference engine, had great potential for practical usefulness.
What was Babbage’s visionary device?
he called it the analytical engine.
What were the five main components?
The first was the input system, for the data and instructions, second is the analytical engine, he called the mill, that would perform the actual calculations; the third is the control mechanism that recorded instructions from the input system and ensured that the prescribed calculations occurred in the proper sequence. Fourth, a memory store was required, to retain not only the original data fed to the machine, but also, crucially, the results of calculations previously performed, for possible use in still further computations. Fifth, Babbage proposed an output device for presenting the final results of the analytical engine’s series of calculations. These five main components still define the major functional units of a modern computer.
Who was Ada Lovelace?
Mathematically gifted, She married William King, who soon after was named the Earl of Lovelace. She officially became Ada, the Countess of Lovelace.
What was Lovelace’s objection?
this constraint has been expressed in more modern terms as: “Computers can only do what they have been programmed to do.”
Who is George Boole?
Babbage didn’t live long enough, however, to see the realization of his and Lovelace’s prediction that the domain of algebra could be greatly expanded. In 1854 the largely self-taught Englishman George Boole introduced the concept of symbolic logic, arguing that all of traditional mathematics should be thought of as just one of many possible forms of systematic symbol manipulation.
What is Boolean Algebra?
Boole translated much of the content of traditional logic into this formal, mathematics-like terminology, using procedures now appropriately referred to as Boolean algebra.
Who is Alan Turing?
The son of a member of the Indian Civil Service, he showed an early aptitude for mathematics and science, which was not particularly rewarded at his classically oriented secondary school.
What is the Turning machine?
This imagined device, which came to be, involved just two essential components. First was a tape, divided into squares each of which may be blank or may contain a single symbol from the set of computable symbols. Second was a head, which rides above the tape and ‘reads’ the squares one at a time.
What are the three possible outcomes?
(1) It can “overwrite” the symbol with a new one or a blank, or keep it the same; (2) it can move the tape one square to the right or to the left (bringing another symbol to be read and operated on), or it mat halt; and (3) it can alter its own internal state or keep it the same.
Where were Turing’s groundbreaking contributions presented?
In a 1937 paper with the main title, “On Computable Numbers.”
Who is Claude Shannon?
an American graduate student in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed the basic idea for an even simpler type of computer architecture.
What are binary switches?
Networks of simple binary switches in either “on” or “off” states could represent the patterns of ones and zeroes constituting the binary code, which in turn could represent complex computational problems.
What is the Turing Test?
in essence, what has com to be called the Turing test assesses the “intelligence” of a machine according to its ability to perform some complex task requiring genuinely intelligent behavior, in a manner outwardly indistinguishable from that of a person.
What is an information theory?
Applying his system of binary logic to communication issues such as speech recognition, the work became an instant classic and initiated the modern field of information theory.
