MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
ETURNING by train recently after a long day by the river, I purchased at the local railway station a copy of the Star evening newspaper. It contained an article by Mr. Merrick inn on the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator. I envied Mr. Winn the tact with which, in this stimulating article, he had combined the light with the serious, the informative with the gay. His description of the Automatic Calculator was the most sym- pathetic description that I have yet read. It contained little to which the most exacting scientist could take objection, and yet it conveyed to people who, like myself, are bad at sums, a very satisfactory idea of what the machine could do and of what it could not do. Those of my friends who have chosen higher mathematics as their pro- fession or pastime assure me that the pleasure which one derives from this branch of study is closely akin to aesthetic pleasure. When spinning their web of numbers they experience a form of delight which is similar to that which less gifted people feel when they read, listen to, or observe a supreme work of art. What the mathematician enjoys is something more than a sense of illimitable perception: he experiences sensations of happiness such as arise in human beings When they arc liberated by genius from the bonds of time and space. The Automatic Calculator, it seems, will henceforward magnify the pleasures of pure mathematics to inconceivable degrees. With but the slightest internal purring it is able to do sums which, before its advent, would have taken squadrons of mathematicians years to work out. One presses a button, one inserts a strip of perforated paper, dials begin to revolve, and in a trice the correct answer is furnished at a speed 15,000 times more rapid than the functioning of even the smartest brain. It can multiply 2598769867 by 9656438259 in 1-200th of a second. Even the most senior wrangler can't do that.
The important thing to remember, as Mr Winn warns us, is that the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator is not a mechanical brain. It possesses a memory, in the shape of facts packed tight ; it possesses miraculous powers of combination and deduction ; it can with lightning speed reach conclusions which are beyond the capacity of our own little brain-boxes ; but it is unable to think. The questions which are set to it have first to be drafted in the simplest terms by expert mathematicians ; teams of wranglers have to reduce propositions to their elementary components before the machine will even start to work. These condensed calculations are fed to the machine in code on a ticker tape and arc thereafter stored in a series of clectroniG memory files. These files can store at one and the same time as many at 512 numbers, each of ten figures, and once it gets going the Calculator can work out 15,000 basic operations in a minute. This is impressive. The machine as at present con- structed (and it is continually being improved) contains 3,500 operating valves, many miles of wirer and 120 panels supported upon racks. What worries me is what happens if one of these parts fails. Supposing one of the valves falls ill, a piece of wire becomes frayed, or one of the panels fails to record or store impressions ? If you or I make a mistake in our sums, the resulting damage is seldom more than L2 12s. 4d. But if the Calculator has a defective valve, then the result might be Some 548,374,932 times wrong. And if the mathematicians are unable to calculate as fast as the Calculator, how can they calculate when the Calculator calculates incorrectly ? It is, as we all know, human to err ; but human errors are at least measurable ; the errors of this new machine could only be assessed, or measured, by itself. Here again our ingenuity has outstripped our intelligence.
* * * * The frightening thing about this machine is, as Mr. Winn so aptly warned us, that it is unable to discriminate. Its industry is super- human, its powers of analysis rapid and precise, its gift of concentra- tion beyond anything hitherto conceived, its accuracy (when in perfect health) entirely dependable. But it is incapable, as even human robots ar, incapable, of distinguishing between what is useful and what is not. From time •to time the mathematicians and the engineers, who supply the monster with oil and electricity and feed it with facts, will try rather mean experiments in order to demonstrate the ultimate superiority of man's unconquerable mind. They will make a fool of their monster in order to cure him of all spiritual pride. In their lighter moments they will thus ask the machine to multiply 7924765893 by 0. The coded words are inserted upon their perforated strip, the dials start revolving, and the Calculator continues to calculate for hours of patient industry, unable to achieve any result. In general, however, the machine serves higher purposes. It can provide endless aesthetic pleasures for the mathematicians ; it can work out the strains and stresses to which aeroplanes will be exposed when flying faster than sound ; it will be of immense assist- ance to engineers, architects and statisticians ; it may even be able, as science progresses, to work out within an hour or two the amount I owe the Inland Revenue or the total. losses on the Groundnuts Scheme—problems which, without the Calculator, would have taken accountants many years. This wonderful if insentient instrument of precision is, appropriately enough, housed at Cambridge, where it is in the charge of Di. Wilkes and Mr. Renwick. It is visited by mathematicians and photographers from all over the world. But to the layman it appears only as a jumble of valves and wires.
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So long as the Cambridge monster confines himself to sums and figures, he will not, I trust, do any irreparable damage. Great benefits may even accrue to ,astronomers and those who experiment in physics. The machine may even be able to invent cipher com- binations so intricate that no cryptographer will be able to decode them, unless of course he or his Government possess a similar machine. The worst that could happen, I suppose, is that, owing to a fault in a valve, some trustful engineer might be tempted to build a bridge 458,763 milts too long, or that the B.B.C. time-signal and Tim should become so dominated by the monster that they would give us the hour several light-years in front of time. What really alarms me loathe whisper that reaches us from America that these machines will eventually be turned oh to words. I can con- ceive it possible that, without much permanent injury to the brain of man, mechanical aids might be applied to such operations as census returns, electoral registers and even social statistics. I do not quite like the idea, since any large error in such calculations (and as I said the Calculator when it errs will err vastly) might seriously distort the facts npon which our statesmen base their policies. It would be regrettable, for instance, if the Calculator, owing to a frayed wire, were on the eve of polling day to give us the name Smithson 586,792 times over, or to assess the population of Luton as fifteen million times larger than that of London. Such errors would not, however, be irremediable. The Americans, who relish excess, are already suggesting that their machines before long
will be able to compose sonnets and speeches. For all we know the uniformity and repetitions of Soviet pronouncements may be due to the use of some such system of valves and wires. But if Western poetry is to be mechanised, then assuredly the monster should be kept quiet henceforward by setting him to multiply ten sets of ten figures by o. * * * *
I am indeed obliged to Mr. Merrick Winn for having told me so much about the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, the pet name for which is Edsac and the popular misnomer for whioh is the "mechanical brain." Such portraits as I have seen of the monster give him a jumbled and inhuman appearance ; he is as ugly as the dangers which he may come to represent. Edsac may well develop to a point when he becomes for us the symbol it•the detest- able intrusion of science upon the spontaneous working of our poor human mind ; the presage of the day when our sufferings and happi- ness will be measured by machines ; the dire portent of what may prove the greatest misery of mankind, when our gifts of invention dominate, and then destroy, our capacity for thought.
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