Weizenbaum was shocked with users' reaction to ELIZA. He found it shocking that users opened their hearts to ELIZA, revealed secrets/personal problems with her(or should I say it), thought it was a real therapist and that it really understood them and believed that it could help. Upon informing his secretary that he had logs of all the conversations, she reacted with outrage at the invasion of her privacy.
Weizenbaum perceived his own program as a threat.His first reaction was to shut down the ELIZA program. His second reaction was to write a book about the whole experience tilted "Computer Power and Human Reason". Two chapters of the book are an attack on artificial intelligence, on ELIZA and on computer science research in general while the rest of the book explains how a computer works. Weizenbaum later became one of the leading critics of artificial intelligence. Plug & Pray is a 2010 documentary film about the problems and ethics of artificial intelligence and robotics. The main protagonists are Joseph Weizenbaum and Raymond Kurzweil. Weizenbaum watched helplessly as technology was entrusted with decision-making and was extensively employed by the military. Interviewed just prior to his death, he states: “War might not exist now if there wasn’t the capacity to wage it remotely.” The film delves into a world where computer technology, robotics, biology, neuroscience, and developmental psychology merge.
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The Pickwick Papers also known as "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club" is Charles Dickens' first novel. It was published in 1837 and its genre is fiction/ social criticism.Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) was an English writer and social critic and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period and as a literary genius by critics and scholars in the twentieth century. His novels and short stories are still read by many nowadays.
David Gawen Champernowne (1912 – 2000) was an undergrad in where he first majored in mathematics and then in economics.
Champernowne was the first to give simply constructed normal numbers. The easiest is: 0.1234567891011121314151617... It is now called Champernowne's constant and he published a paper proving that it is normal in 1933. He was also a remarkable economist. He picked a hole in John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Keynes was the one who noticed Champernowne's potential in economics and advised him to major in it. During World War II, he first worked in the statistical section of the prime minister's office to supply quantitative information to help Winston Churchill make decisions; then, in 1941, he moved on to become a program director in the Ministry of Aircraft Production. Alan Turing and David Champernowne became friends when they were both studying mathematics at King's College, Cambridge. They were both good chess players and in 1948 they wrote a computer program to play chess. The program was called Turochamp and Champernowne said about it: "Most of our attention went to deciding which moves were to be followed up. My memory about this is infuriatingly weak, Captures had to be followed up at least to the point where no further captures was immediately possible. Check and forcing moves had to be followed further. We were particularly keen on the idea that whereas certain moves would be scorned as pointless and pursued no further others would be followed quite a long way down certain paths. In the actual experiment I suspect we were a bit slapdash about all this and must have made a number of slips since the arithmetic was extremely tedious with pencil and paper. Out general conclusion was that a computer should be fairly easy to program to play a game of chess against a beginner and stand a fair chance of winning or least reaching a winning position." There were no machines to execute or test Turochamp when it was invented. Thus, to test it, Turing acted as a human CPU. Turochamp lost to Alick Glennie(Turing's colleague) in 1952 and the game was recorded . Turochamp won against Champernowne's wife who was a beginner at playing chess. Turochamp incorporated important methods of evaluation as well as the concepts of selectivity and dead position. As soon as the Ferranti Mark 1 computer was constructed, Turing started to implement Turochamp at Machester University, but he never finished it. In 2012, the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov played a game of chess against Turochamp live on stage at The University of Manchaster's Alan Turing Centenary Conference. Turochamp was designed to play two moves ahead, whereas Kasparov often considers at least ten moves ahead and hence he won the game with 16 moves. Nonetheless, he praised Turing’s research saying: “I suppose you might call it primitive, but I would compare it to an early car – you might laugh at them but it is still an incredible achievement." |