Word: goofing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...says Richard Witt, 35, chief of advanced development for Raytheon's communication and data-processing operation. "Rather, we have duplicated the human learning process-experience, trial and error, correlation of new facts with past experience." The Cybertron K-ioo gets some outside help: it is equipped with a "goof button," which a human tutor presses whenever the machine makes a mistake. Accepting this advice stolidly, the Cybertron thereafter does not repeat the error...
...porpoise, the ocean floor, or schools of fish. Even an ordinary computer could solve the same problem, but only after a tedious programing telling it exactly how. The Cybertron was merely fed a variety of sounds -several thousand-and after some diligent work by Witt on the goof button, it soon learned to discriminate infallibly. The Cybertron responds by flashing lights on its console, can give not only "yes" (the submarine) and "no" (the porpoise) answers but a broad variety of "maybes" (sounds like...
...scapegoat, most newsmen nominated the Central Intelligence Agency. "America would be safer," said the Raleigh News and Observer, if CIA Chief Allen Dulles "were allowed to depart, taking his frayed cloak and blunt dagger with him into private life." Chicago's American indicted the CIA for "a gigantic goof," and even Columnist Eleanor Roosevelt suggested mildly that the CIA "was not very well informed...
More elaborate psychological devices will deliver only one food pellet per minute. Bright chimponauts soon learn this limitation. They work the levers only enough to collect one pellet. Then they goof off for 45 seconds until the machine is ready to start another cycle. "Two years ago," says Psychologist Rohles, "I wouldn't have given a nickel for a carload of chimps, but I can't praise them too highly now." Some of the Air Force psychologists even claim they are afraid to teach the chimps to play poker, for fear they would win all the loose cash...
...results, Sir Abubakar, normally mild and patient, hounds his ministers, occasionally displaying to inept underlings a towering temper never seen in public. An error can bring simply a long, cold stare; it can also bring an explosion, as it did recently when a minister tried to justify an obvious goof. "That is quite enough," snapped the Prime Minister. "Shut...