Those Talented Machines
How They'll Run Your Life
There's almost nothing
that today's electronic brains
can't do better and faster
than you can!
By CARL BAKAL
Several months aco, the Air Force un
veiled a machine with a most extraor
dinary talent: a mechanical translator ca
pable of turning Russian into English far
faster than any human being can. Whereas
the average human needs quite a time to
translate a page of Russian into English,
the new device can do the same job in
just 30 seconds!
The high-speed translator is, of course,
that highly complex device known as a
computer or "electronic brain." The heart
of computers of this type is an elephantine
memory mechanism in which are stored
in the form of some code all the infor
mation and instructions needed for the job
to be performed. In the case of the trans
lator, the memory mechanism is a 10-inch,
disk-shaped glass "dictionary" which con
tains a 55,000-word Russian-English vocab
ulary in the form of concentric tracks of
black and white spots, each representing a
word or phrase.
Electronic brains have been doing intri
cate tasks like this for years and promise
to have a greater and greater impact on
your everyday life.
In what may well presage a mechanical
matchmaker of the future, stunt-master Art
Linkletter some years ago used Univac, one
of the electronic brains, on his "People
Are Funny" TV show to match a young
couple according to various characteristics.
Univac has so far proved to be as reliable
"as a Cupid as it had previously been in pre
dicting election results. For the machine
sponsored romance blossomed into mar
riage, and the Univac couple turned up on
the Linkletter show recently to celebrate
their fust anniversary.
Whether machines will ever be devised
to mend broken hearts is questionable, but
electronic brains have already proved their
ability to diagnose physical ailments rela
tively as well'as physicians working with the
same information. Into an IBM computer
some years ago were popped punched cards
summarizing the symptoms of 350 patients.
Each card was . coded on the basis of a
questionnaire tilled out by the patient.
The machine correctly identified 48 per
cent of the patients' ailments. A physician,
(Continued on page 19)
16 Family Weekly, Jammrv 29, 1961
IllUSTRATIONS BY JOHN HUEHNERGARTH