Word: shannons
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When a through of draft-wary upperclassmen besieged Shannon Hall this fall to join up in one of Harvard's R.O.T.C. units, the Army unit's cycle of popularity reached another peak. It had happened in 1914 and again before the last war, when R.O.T.C. enrollments jumped 50 percent. But this time there was a joker only 46 freshmen showed...
...leading authority on the subject, Dr. Claude E. Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories, believes that a computer can play-theoretically-a perfect (unbeatable) game of chess. But on the practical side, no existing or projected computer is fast enough to make the calculations. In planning a typical 40-move game, he figures, the machine would have to make 10¹²º (10 followed by 119 zeros) calculations. Even at the lightning speed of electronic computers, the job would take 1090 years before the machine could make the first move...
...would be easier, says Shannon, to make a machine play a fair game of chess, seeing three moves ahead and avoiding obvious bad strategy. Such a machine would play rapidly and would have no mental lapses. It would never get lazy or nervous. On the other hand, it would lack flexibility, imagination and the valuable human ability to learn by experience. It would never beat a good player...
...recent issue of Britain's Nature, Dr. J. Bronowski of the Central Research Establishment of the National Coal Board takes issue with Dr. Shannon. A chess-playing computer, he says, could be made to learn by experience just as a human being does. It could be given a memory of unlimited capacity. It could remember each move in all the games it had played. By classifying moves, it could determine which were most successful in each chess situation. It could even classify its opponents by the character of their moves. Eventually, says Bronowski, when the computer's memory...
...Reporter Shannon was drawing no conclusions from the schools she had seen, thought the plain facts alarming enough in themselves. Judging by the mail coming into the Journal from aroused parents, most readers seemed to think...