No one; you heard about this creature; kirobo
is a small robot, 34 centimeter; it comes
to
about your knee or something; build by Japan,
needless to say, it is Japanese based ahead
of the rest of the world in robotics.
And, this robot has been sent to space on
Sunday that
is how it came into news.
If you are watching some news channel, well,
but may be BBC
or something else, the Japanese space agency
has sent this robot into space.
It is a small robot which can recognize speech,
understand what you are saying, talk back
and recognize faces, and so on, exactly.
And, the idea is that this robot will be a
companion for a Japanese astronaut who is
scheduled to go in November sometime; and,
that is an interesting idea, robots as companions
of people.
..
.
So, if you remember, we had talked about,
I had mentioned about this chess grandmaster
David Levy.
In 1968 he had a chess bet we had talked about
this in the last class.
And, he
had said that no program can beat him for
the next 10 years which he luckily survived
the bet.
Because, now as we know, chess playing programs
are much better, but in 2008
he is talking about robot companions.
So, he is come from one end of the pendulum
in which he believe that chess, a program,
a computer program could not do anything interesting,
to the other end where he believes
that robots can be companions to human beings.
So, he wrote this book, it is called, it has
published in 2008, and the title of the book
is “Love and Sex with Robots”.
And, the idea behind the book is something
which many parts of the world now looking
at; specially those parts of the world which
have aging populations where they do not
have enough young to take care of the old.
But, of course, he is not talking of old here,
but where robots could take care of people.
So, robots can be companions and so on.
So,
that is the book he wrote in 2008.
And, for example, what looks like a young
lady,
whereas in fact, it is a robot, the thing
here.
So, this idea of creating robots in the image
of us has been around for a long time, and
we will look at some of this history today;
and, robotic companions could well be there
in the future essentially.
So, we saw in the last class; so, I just quickly
go over this.
These
are the syllabus which will be available in
some place and the text books.
And, these are
the 2 books that we will be following in the
next couple of lectures – “AI: The Very
.Idea” by Haugeland and “Machines Who
Think” by Pamela McCorduck.
We saw some definitions of AI.
So, therefore, 4 things here - one is that
if they do
machines are intelligent, if they do things
which human beings are considered to be
intelligent for; another definition is that
AI is the enterprise of solving heart problems
and finding polynomial time solutions.
And, we must, of course, qualify that by saying
that these are approximate solutions, so,
or they are not necessarily optimal solutions.
And then, the AI, the study of mental faculties
by creating computation models that is the
idea given by Sania Macdomote.
But, the idea, but the definition that we
like most is
given by Haugeland.
And, the definition says that AI is interested
in the idea of machines
with minds of their own essentially.
And, this is the idea that you will pursue
in the next
couple of lectures.
.
We asked some fundamental questions in the
last class - what is intelligence?
What is
thinking?
And, we got several responses here; what we
think is intelligent behavior?
So,
problem solving, reasoning, learning, perception
and language; language was mentioned
in the last class.
..
So, let me ask a question here.
Language is something which is unique to human
beings.
And, many people believe that it is instrumental
in intelligent behavior.
But, the question
that I want to ask is if you look at language
and thought, what came first?
So, he was
thinking because of the language or was language
was because of the thinking.
In the
sense, is that what ability to think dependent
upon the scale of language that we have, or
did language come because we are able to think?
So, let me see what people think here.
And, again I will emphasize that there is
no
correct answer to this question; in the sense
that it is like the chicken and egg problem.
But, what do students think?
And, I hope students from Monday will also
join in, with
their opinions.
Can we think without language?
Let me ask in this way.
Or, is thinking
closely tied to language?
You are saying, no; we can think without language.
So, can
you, sort of, justify, or support your answer?
Student: Abstract thoughts we have; so, those
are not language; those are not language
dependent or something.
So, abstract thoughts are not language dependent;
now that is a, some more debatable
claim essentially.
So, the question I am asking really is that
our thoughts made up of
language, or all our thoughts, good thoughts
imply language; can we think without taking
recourse to language.
So, when you say language, we really mean
symbol because
language is just one kind of a symbol system
essentially.
Is it possible to think?
Now you
said graphics or visual images, yeah that
is the thing which comes to mind, that if
you
.recall visual images then you are not really
talking about words or things like that.
Interestingly, you have heard of Chomsky,
right.
Yeah.
So, is there anyone who is not
heard of Noom Chomsky?
What is he doing nowadays?
He visited India few years ago
as well.
So, he is actually become a political activist.
.
But, many years ago when he was active in
linguistics he put forward the idea of
universal grammar; so, UG, that it is called.
And, he said that human beings are born
with grammar in their heads, whatever that
means in the heads, we will not explore that
question, but essentially our brains come
prewired with the faculty of linguistic ability
which is, sort of, some kind of a grammar.
And, what he says is that depending upon which
place, which society you grow up in,
you tune that grammar to that particular language
that exists in that society essentially.
So, Chomsky, of course, so, he is saying that
language came first; that we are born with
the ability to use language, and may be that
helped us, of course; he is not saying that,
but may be that helped us in our ability to
think essentially.
But, anyway that is an open
question; may be at later point I will come
back to it.
..
So, we also ask some question as to, what
is a machine?
Is the computer a machine?
And
we said that, yes, we will assume that; whenever
we talk of machines thinking we will be
talking about computer programs running.
And of course, we ask the question that, are
we machines; that is something you can found
over and some reactions to that.
.
.
So, historically there have been arguments
against thinking.
So, we had discussed 3
arguments by Dreyfus which says that there
is something intuitionistic going on in our
heads; something which is kind of intuition
which we cannot define in terms of rules.
So,
.when Dreyfus was talking about all these
people, we were talking about rules as a
mechanism for reasoning.
And, he said that there is certain kind of
unconscious instincts
that we have which cannot be captured in rules
essentially.
John Searle, a philosopher, use the Chinese
Room argument; and he says the argument
was that just because he can manipulate symbols
and convince somebody that you are
doing something, like for example, children
doing long division.
Do they understand
when, whether, what is really, what are they
really doing.
Or, when even younger
children do addition; so, they add 2 numbers,
where looking up a table, do a carryover,
then add, and so on and so forth.
You are doing simple manipulations.
Are you
understanding, what is behind that activity
essentially?
All older students, should I say, when they
are dealing with things like Fourier
transforms and so on and so forth, are you
doing it mechanically, or have you mugged
up
a formula of how to integrate something, or
do you understand what is happening behind
that decision.
So, what Searle says is that symbol manipulation,
the ability to manipulate
symbols is not necessarily a guarantee that
you are intelligent; maybe you are following
some rules which somebody has taught you;
this is how you add numbers and so on and
so forth.
And, Penrose, the celebrated scientist says
that there is something quantum mechanical
going on in our brains essentially.
So, there are other arguments based on emotion
in
intuition, consciousness, ethics, and so on
which we will ignore.
.
.Then, Alan Turing, and he said that the question
whether machines can think is
meaningless.
Let us not try an answer because first you
have to answer what is thinking
and only then you can say whether machines
can think essentially or not essentially.
He
said that let me prescribe a test which is
called as a imitation game, and which we now
called that Turing test.
And, at that time when he prescribed it in
this book that is mentioned in this slide
here, in
the paper that is mentioned here, „Computing
Machinery and Intelligence‟ appeared in
1950.
It is available on the link that is given
in the page.
He believed that in 50 years on
then which is in 2000, machines would be able
to pass his so called Turing test
essentially.
.
And, what is the test?
This is where we stopped in the last class.
The test is that there is a
human judge sitting out there, interacting
over some medium; it could be nowadays a
mobile phone where you are chatting with someone;
or, in those days it was a teletype
which was connected to another room in which
the other person who was responding;
and what Turing said was that if that human
judge can confidently discriminate whether
the other side is man or a computer, then
the computer has failed the test.
But, if the
computer can, most of the times convince the
judge that the judge is talking to a human
then the computer has passed the Turing test.
So, this is what is known as a Turing test
of intelligence you might say, to test whether
system is intelligent you will pass it through
the Turing test and then decide whether it
is
.intelligent.
You do not ask, what you mean by thinking,
what is intelligence; and you
know that do not go into fundamentals.
And, as I said, there is a Loebner prize which
is
currently available; still now 100, 000 US
dollars to anybody who can pass the test,
so to
speak essentially.
So, the question which I left the class with
was, what you think of the Turing test as
a
test of intelligence?
Do you have any views on this?
Is it a good test?
Is it a bad test?
Do
you agree that if a computer passes a test
it will be considered to be intelligent, it
qualify
to be called intelligent?
Any thoughts on this?
While you are thinking, meanwhile let me
address the mandy students.
So, welcome again, and the basic idea of the
first few lectures is that they are going
to be
a study of history and philosophy behind AI,
what has happened in the last few 100 years
which has led to the development of AI currently.
And, after those 2 or 3 lectures we will
have a qualitative shift, and we will spend
most of the time using algorithms, using the
syllabus which I will convey to you essentially.
So, is it a good test or a bad test?
Surely
you can have some opinion.
Yes.
Student: I mean you cannot judge the intelligence
because like any performer can see the
past media like through what type of question
a grandmaster configuration and based on
that data.
Yes, if that is, precisely what happens is
Loebner prize is a context which takes place
every year, and as I said this year it is
going to, the final is going to take place
on
September 14.
And, this one of the leading programs is called
Izar and this is a
pronunciation transcript from the earlier
competition rounds.
So, you have seen it and
you can look at it again.
So, obviously, people who like such programs
look at the history just like students who
write exams they look at history of past questions,
even such people essentially.
So, that
is all allowed; everything is allowed.
Can you write a computer program which will
cool
the judge, if you want to use the term, to
thinking that the judge is talking to a human
being.
..
And, this was the conversation that we saw
this izar had.
And, he is making statements
like I am getting into, when he is talking
about music he is making statements about,
the
last couple of lines you will see, I have
been getting into Hoomii, a type of Mongolian
throat singing.
What kind of music do you like?
So, obviously, such a program will have
to be equipped with general knowledge, atleast
which everybody knows essentially.
So, I
mean no human would be, would not knowing
it essentially.
So, you have to have that
kind of knowledge.
Of course, you also have to have some kind
of a rhetorical skills and ways of getting
around questions and things like that, all
that is part of it.
What if I were to give it to 12
digit numbers to multiply; say, what is the
product of 2 billion 29 million whatever,
some
12, 13 digit number I say, I give 2 12 digit
numbers and ask it what is the product of
that,
and the computer, poor thing, being a computer
gives me the answer before I even finish
the question, almost finish the question.
Would not I be able to say no, no, you are
not a
human being?
So, I will again leave it you to think about
this; is it a good test or bad
test?
..
But, you have did mention Eliza, a program
written 1966 when computer has just come
into place by Weizenbaum.
And, it is a program for simple manipulation
of rules.
If you
take the input, do a little bit of twisting,
turn it round of it and put it back to the
user; and,
to some people it is, one version of it called
Doctor, sounded like a psychotherapist.
And
they would start talking to the program as
if they were talking to a therapist.
And, this was a Russian scientist who was
visiting Stanford who actually went through
this conversation, and we saw that in the
last class.
And, what you see in purple is the
fact that how this program is manipulating
your input into generating its own output
essentially.
So, something like I am feeling a bit tired,
and it says why do you think you
are feeling a bit tired, is standard; and,
new questions like tell me about your family
and
so on.
Weizenbaum did not like the way people responded
to Eliza.
It is a very simple program.
It is nothing deep sophisticated about it,
but people used to interact with it as if
they were
interacting with somebody who understood the
complexities of their problems and thinks
like that essentially.
So, he wrote this book “Computer Power and
Human Reason: From
Judgment to Calculation”.
He wanted say, in essence, that AI is not
possible; that you know computers can never
be
as deep thinkers as the therapist can be essentially.
So, there is a difference between what
can be, what appears to be, essentially.
And, human beings have a tendency, we have,
we
are willing to suspend our disbelief essentially.
They are willing to watch a James Bond
.movie and believe that all that is happening
is possible, and all kinds of things
essentially.
.
So, the fact that the man made artifact could
respond to human input easily leads humans
to make a leap of faith and conclude that
it responds intelligently and knowledgeably.
Throughout centuries we have been doing that
essentially.
So, in olden times, in Egypt,
people believed that statues which moved and
gestured had a sort of a soul, and they
could represent a god or a dead person and
communicate through a priest essentially.
So, I said older times Egypt, but even today
you can find in our country this sort of a
thing happening.
You have people who will eat tea leaves, or
people who communicate
with your ancestors, or people who go and
get their fortunes foretold by a parrot who
pulls a card out of a bunch of cards.
So, we do it all the time.
And. we believe, will not
everybody, we mostly believe that this is
possible essentially.
Such practices continued
to this day essentially.
And, in Europe, there was a great fascination
for such moving figures, moving automita,
or, you know, statues which could move around
shake their heads and so on.
So, Pamela
McCorduck writes in a book “Machines Who
Think” that in medieval times art of
making clocks decorated and animated figures
was very popular essentially.
So, if you
go to Germany, you can still find them.
For example, in clock towers when it is 12
noon
suddenly there is a lot of music and some
statues come out and do something and go
back in, that kind of stuff.
.So, it was popular in medieval times that
learned men kept robots essentially.
By learned
men, know, society was not very as galantive
as it was now; they were the kings, and
they were the peasants, and they were the
learned men, they were the traders and the
warriors.
So, there are classes of people, in those
learned men kept robots.
And, most interestingly to most people there
could be little difference between a human
figure that nodded, bowed, marched, or struck
a gong at a precise and predictable
moment which is entirely feasible.
You can construct machinery which is accurate,
and
we know that such machinery exist, so between
surf machinery and a human figure that
answered naughty questions and foretold the
future.
So, for us there is no difference.
If you can construct a statue which can nod
its head and
we ask the question and it nods its head,
we are willing to say that yes it understands
what I am saying and it is telling my future,
and you know that sort of a thing.
So, in the study of history that we are going
to be doing, there going to be two strands
one is this mechanical side of talking statues,
moving statues, and things like that; and
other is going to be the philosophical side
which is about what is the notion of the mind,
how do the notion of the mind come.
You know, I am, so those questions we will
come
to little bit later.
Let us first address the mechanical side of
things essentially.
..
So, all this is happening in Europe.
We have this question of artificial people.
In Homer's
“Illiad” Hephaestus is supposed to have
created this Talos, a man of bronze which
would
patrol the beaches of Crete.
Hephaestus is also supposed to have created
Pandora; you
might have heard about Pandora who commissioned
by Zeus, Zeus was a god, to punish
mankind for accepting Prometheus‟s gift
of fire.
And, Pandora is supposed to take that
casket, but she is so curious about it that
she opens the casket essentially; you know,
and
let lose the evils into this world mostly.
Pygmalion, remember this one act show of Pygmalion
in which there was a character
called Eliza which was a name of the program
written by Weizenbaum.
Pygmalion was
also a mythical creature who was disappointed
by real women and created Galatea in
ivory, and Aphrodite who was another god.
So, the Greeks also had many gods like we
Indians have gods for doing different kinds
of thing.
Aphrodite obliges him by breathing
life into Galatea and apparently, he fell
in love with his own creation like in the
play.
Then Daedalus, you must have heard about,
more, well known for his artificial wings.
He was, he wanted to fly, but he was also
create, credited with creating lifelike statues
that wheezed and blinked, and scuttled about,
impressing everyone.
So, this is the
important thing.
This statues which could seem to be autonomous;
and, if you are
autonomous you must be intelligent essentially.
So, that is the leaf of face that we are
making essentially.
Then, about a 1000 years ago, Pope Sylvester
is said to have made a statue with a talking
.head, with a limited vocabulary, and a penchant
for predicting the future.
So, that is why
people are willing to believe that this talking
head can tell your future; and on being
asking a query, it would reply yes or no by
shaking his head essentially, but all that
is in
myth, essentially.
There is some more mythology.
.
Paracelsus was a physician lived from 1493
to 1541 is supposed to have created a little
man called humunculus essentially.
And, he made this statement: “We shall be
like gods
... we shall duplicate God's greatest miracle
- the creation of man” essentially.
Because in
western thought we have been created in the
image of god himself, and so, we can be
like him and create creatures in our own image.
So, he lived in Switzerland.
And, Judah Loew ben Bezalel is reported to
have sculpted a human, a living man from
clay, and he called him Golem, to defend the
Jews of Prague.
So, in Jewish folklore, a
Golem is an animated anthropomorphic creature
made out of an inanimate matter.
So,
that is a kind of a image, the kind of creature
he supposed to have created essentially.
All
this material that is available in Wikipedia
and I have given all the references from where
I have taken the images.
..
So, let us talk about real mechanisms, or
some of them are mythical of course.
We
cannot imagine man made of clay which could
do all this sort of things.
But, in parallel,
real machinery was being created essentially.
Some of these ideas came from the east by
a Arabian countries.
And, in 802 Haroun-al-Rashid, you know, we
heard his name in other context as well, is
said to have presented Emperor Charlemagne
with an elaborate clock which sent out
dozens of cavaliers from a dozen windows each
and back again.
So, this is the kind of
clockwork which if you go to Eurpoe you can
still see now essentially in this, in the
town, or the city center we have this sort
of machinery still operating.
Then, a group of Arab astrologers is credited
with constructing what they called as a
thinking machine called the zairja which was
designed.
So, it was a collection of rotating
disc, you know, with markings on them.
And, if you rotate the disc according to some
input information you would compute something.
But, their notion was to generate ideas by
mechanical means with a help of a technique
of breaking down called al-jabr which, as
some of you know, is a route for the word
algebra.
And, by combining numbers values associated
with letters and categories, new
paths of insight and thought would be created
essentially.
So, this fascination of
autonomous entities, autonomous machines which
are thinking machines, goes back a
long time essentially.
.So, this zairja caught the imagination of
a Spanish Catalonian missionary called Ramon
Lull, and, who decided to design a Christian
version of it which he calls as Ars Magna.
And, he said the goal is to bring reason to
bear on all subjects, and in this way, arrive
at
the truth without the trouble of thinking
or fact finding.
So, one thing, when you look at
the quotations from these times you must remember
that some of the meanings of the
words are a little bit different from what
they are know essentially.
So, those of you who have read Shakespeare
for example, would know that
Shakespeare‟s English is a little bit different
from our's English, and our English, and we
need to understand things essentially.
But, this notion of arriving at truth without
the
trouble of thinking or fact finding, of course,
has been fulfilled now with programs like
google and so on; just have typing something
and you get answer obviously.
.
So, by the middle of the 14th century, large
clocks and figures became popular in many
areas of Germany and Italy.
And, talking brass heads became closely associated
with
learned man again.
The Archbishop of Salzburg built a working
model of a complete
miniature town, driven by water power essentially,
operated by water power from a
nearby stream.
..
So, 1 or 2 more examples.
Vaucanson's Duck, Vacanson, keep, note the
years; this was,
he made this thing in around 1730 or something
like that, which is quite long time ago.
He was a French inventor.
So, one - he is credited with having made
an android which
could serve dinner and clear tables for the
visiting politicians.
However, one government
official declared that he thought Vaucanson's
tendencies as profane, and ordered his
workshop to be destroyed essentially.
We will see later that this kind of political
oversight has influenced europolian thought
quite a bit political and religious source;
for example, Copernicus and Galileo and all
these people was sort of worried about putting
forward their ideas, about what the world
is really like.
So, he created this, his most famous creation
is this duck called the
mechanical duck which could appear to be drinking,
eating, quacking, splashing about in
water, and digesting its food; became very
famous, 1739.
And, there is a image of a replica of this
duck which is lying in some museum
somewhere.
Though, of course, in real life, meaning in
the actual duck that he created, it
did not have digestive abilities.
The food was actually collected in, the food
that the duck
was supposed to be eating was collected in
one container, and the output was sort of
prestored and sent out from another container.
But, he was hopeful that a truly digesting
automaton could one day be designed.
So, this fascination with machinery is that
you are
trying to look at essentially.
..
Another very famous example is this chess
playing Turk by Kempelen.
Wolfgang
Kempelen, 1734 -1804, he created chess playing
machine known as a Mechanical Turk
constructed in 1770 to impress the Empress
Maria Theresa of Austria.
And, the
mechanism appeared to be able to play a strong
game of chess against human opponents,
as well as perform the knight's tour.
So, you must be familiar with the knight‟s
tour on
the 64 board chess square, can you move a
knight to cover all the squares exactly ones.
And, the figure on the bottom is knights to
a apparently created by the Mechanical Turk,
looks quite a aesthetic figure to make.
Actually, you might have written a program
to
create a knight‟s tour of some point.
Now, this was the automaton which Kempelen
took
all over Europe; he impressed Napoleon and
other people, beating his general Hectaus.
And, here is the picture of the automaton.
You can see it; maybe I should make it a bit
larger.
If you look carefully, you can see that inside
this box was a human chess player
sitting this.
So, it was a really a Hokes.
Since, it was not discovered for a long time
essentially.
And it travelled for nearly 84 years, Europe
and America, beating all kinds of
luminaries at chess.
It seems, Edgar Allan Pope wrote an essay
trying to expose that this chess play cannot
be
a real machine.
So, let us move on to more useful things.
Mechanical arithmetic; can we
make machines which will do arithmetic for
us?
So, Pascal, of course, you are familiar
with.
As students of science in various places Pascal‟s
name is appeared; not least as the
programming language, name of a programming
language.
.So, he invented a mechanical calculator using
something called Lanthonyer which we
will not go into.
And, he tried out 50 different prototypes
before presenting his machine
in 1645 with a public.
It was called Pascalin or reflecting machines
or Pascal's calculator.
And, you could add and subtract 2 numbers;
that was its limits of its mental abilities,
and
multiply and divide by repetition essentially.
There is a image of Pascaline from one of
the museums.
And, he received the rights to
produce this machine and sell it in France,
but it was not something which was
commercially viable for him.
So, as this article says, the cost and complexity
of
producing the Pascaline was too much for him;
and the production ceased in a year.
This
is a real machine which could add, subtract,
and multiply, 2 numbers.
So, you can see,
we are already looking at advent of calculating
machines.
.
So, all these are famous names.
You must have encountered them.
For example, Leibniz
we know as an inventor of the calculus.
So, these are sort of multifaceted people
with all
kinds of things in those days.
So, he was a German philosopher and a mathematician.
He
started to work on his own calculator after
Pascal's death.
So, he invented something
which is called as a Leibniz wheel or a stepped
drum which could do counting in some
sense.
So, here is the image from the Wikipedia site.
So, you can see there is a gear in the red
color fixed to a rod.
And, depending upon; and there is a step set
of teeth in the orange
cylinder.
So, depending upon where the gear is it would
be rotated some number of times
.dependent upon howmany of those teeth is
encountered essentially.
So, when it was on
the lower part it would count 0 or 1, if it
was raised to the extreme right then it would
be
struck by let us say 9 or 10 teeth and it
would count of 10.
So, it is just a small counting
device that he invented.
All these machines in those times were mechanical
in nature.
It is called as stepped
drum.
And, as you can see from this quote it was
used for 3 centuries until the advent of
the electronic calculator which came only
much later in life, in fact, in the last century.
And, he build this machine called the stepped
reckoner.
So, the stepped reckoner, the
stepped name comes from the kind of drumit
uses, the step drum.
It was a digital mechanical calculator invented
by Leibniz around 1672 and completed in
1694.
It could perform multiplication by repeated
addition, and division by repeated
subtraction.
And, it could operate with 8 digit numbers.
So, if you multiply 2, 8 digit
numbers it would give you 16 digit answer.
So, that was its precision; and image of the
stepped reckoner from one of the museums essentially.
..
Leibniz, of course, was as I said, multifaceted
person.
He believed that much of human
listening could be reduced to calculations
of a sort.
We are moving towards AI in some
sense; that can we have machines automaton
which think and it can do reasoning, and
you know, including things like arithmetic.
But, he is going behind arithmetic.
He is
saying that human visioning could be reduced
to calculation of a sort and such
calculations could resolve many differences
of opinion essentially.
So, here is a quote from Leibniz.
He says, “the only way to rectify our reasonings,
and
mind this language is not modern language,
it is slightly old language, the only way
to
rectify our reasonings is to make them as
tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so
that
we can find our error at a glance, and when
there is a dispute among people, persons,
we
can simply say; Let us calculate without further
ado, to see who is right”.
The motivation behind devising logic is the
same essentially.
And, we will see that logic
also evolved from similar background.
But, this idea that arguments can be settled
by
calculation, so you do not have to fight or
something like that, also goes back to those
time.
Of course, if we tell this to the UP government
they would not believe it
essentially.
So, these are the general principles of his
logic, and, in fact, his whole
philosophy.
And, they are, that all our ideas are compounded
from a very small number of simple
ideas which form the alphabet of human thought
essentially, very significant step is
making essentially.
He says that everything that we think about
is essentially
.combinations of some small set of simple
things.
Remember, in those days, physics or
science had still not discovered the notion
of an atom.
All those ideas came much later
essentially.
And, Leibniz is talking about the fact that
there are small number of simple ideas which
combine and form complex ideas to form new
ideas essentially.
And, this is an idea
which, sort of, carries forward to present
that knowledge representation as well.
They
have been approaches to knowledge representation
which says that we will work with
small number primitive concepts and derive
all other concepts from those concepts
essentially.
So, it is a very significant idea.
So, the alphabet of human thought.
And secondly, complex ideas proceed from these
simple ideas by a uniform and
symmetrical combination, analogous to arithmetical
multiplication.
So, what you mean
by uniform and symmetrical combination?
Is that there is a well defined way of doing
things essentially, well defined mechanical
way of just like you have algorithms for
adding or doing long division or multiplication,
you have a algorithms for combining
smaller ideas into more complex one.
So, there are two things he is saying - one
is that everything, all ideas are made up
of first
finite set of simple ideas, and then there
is a uniform way of combining ideas to form
more complex ideas.
Then remember this was in the 17th century.
..
The first commercial success of a mechanical
calculator was in 1820.
Thomas de Colmar
from France, he built this machine and it
was strong and steady enough to extend daily
use in the office environment essentially.
So, if you look at the last paragraph, so
these
are some of the images which are of those
real machines.
And, as you can see the second
paragraph they were manufactured from 1851
to 1915.
So, not even 100 years ago you
might have found people using such a machine
to do arithmetic essentially.
The last idea says that its sturdy design
made it a key player in the move from human
computers to calculating machines that took
place during the second half of the 19th
century.
So, I want to draw your attention to the phrase
human computers.
Before our
computers, digital computers, or mechanical
computers that we will see in the moment
were invented, but the word computation was
essentially applied to human beings.
The
human beings computed things and they were
called computers essentially; and this is
the term that you will see again later sometime.
..
That brings us to the first computer, so,
you all familiar with Charles Babbage I presume;
18th century; he was a mathematician, philosopher,
inventor, mechanical engineer; best
remembered for his idea of the programmable
computer.
All the machines that we have
seen so far were not programmable; they could
do arithmetic for example, and that was
about it essentially.
Charles Babbage took this to the next step.
So, he as a child was fascinated by the same
automaton, the kind of talking heads, moving
figures that we talked about.
And he, this is
a quote from what he said about some statues
that he saw displayed by a man called
Merlin.
And, he described them as saying, there is
2 feminine figures, he says, one walked, used
an eye-glass occasionally, and bowed frequently;
her motions were singularly graceful.
And he says, the other was a dancer, full
of imagination, I do not know how he got that,
and irresistible essentially.
So, this was the general fascination with
talking, moving
figures that, you know, was pushing all these
ideas forward essentially.
So, in 1822 he began a building what is called
as a difference engine; you must have
heard the term.
It was designed to compute polynomial functions,
more than addition and
multiplication.
The first engine was composed of 25,000 parts
weighed about 13,600 kilo
grams, and was 8 feet tall.
...
Here is an image of a difference engine.
On the bottom we can see.
On the bottom left
you can see an image which is there in London
science museum.
And, on its right is a
small enlargement of the gear system that
it was using.
And, on the top is a part of a
difference engine assembled after his death
by his son, using parts found in his lab
essentially.
That is a original Babbage engine, whereas
what here is a recreation, modern
recreation of the difference engine that you
can see.
So, these are working machines.
..
One place where Babbage got some ideas was
from the so called Jaquard Looms
essentially.
So, why the computer are different machine
from the rest of the machines,
because it is programmable; and how was it
programmable, because we have this idea of
a stored program.
We can plug in a program and learn that program,
then we can plug in
a different program and learn the different
program.
So, the stored program which can be
input.
The idea came from this Jaquard Looms which
was, which is the kind of punched cards
that you see here on the left which is an
enlargement of the figure on right which were
used to create designs in fabric essentially.
This looms were create to, used to create
this
pattern fabrics; and the pattern could be
conclude by this punched cards.
So, this idea of
punched cards is what Babbage took from there.
..
.
And he created what is known as the analytic
engine.
It was a proposed, he did not
actually build it, mechanical general purpose
computer designed by Charles Babbage,
first describe in 1837.
It had an arithmetical logic unit control
flow, all modern terms in
computer science in the form of conditional
and branching loops and integrated memory.
And, it was the first machine which in the
modern sense could be said to be Turingcomplete
which means it is equivalent to a Turing machine.
..
The first programmer was his accomplice, a
collaborator, Augusta Ada King.
She was a
daughter of Lord Byron who was a poet.
She is now known as Ada Lovelace, was
English mathematician and writer, chiefly
known for the work that she did along with
Babbage.
So, her notes include what can be called as
a first algorithm which is processed
by a machine, and because of this she is often
called as the first programmer.
And, the
programming language ADA that you might have
heard about, promoted by the US
department of defense, is named after her.
..
So, she went beyond number crunching.
Again, like (49:20) she realized the potential
of
the device extended far more beyond number
crunching.
And, she wrote, and this is the
quotation, that the analytical might act upon
other things besides number, were objects
found whose mutual fundamental relations could
be expressed by those of the abstract
science of operations, and so on.
And then in particular she talks about generating
music.
She says, that supposing that
fundamental relations of pitched sounds and
the science of harmony and musical
composition were susceptible of such expressions,
the engine might compose elaborate
and scientific pieces of music of any degree
of complexity essentially.
So, even then Babbage was just designing this
analytical engine which is not even built,
and she was imagining that such a machine
would compose music essentially; because
now days we know, it can be done.
..
And finally, in this study of mechanical history
we look at this first electronic machine
which was built called ENIAC.
You must be familiar with it.
And, you can just see the
size of ENIAC – 17,000 vacuum tubes, 7,
200 crystal diodes, and so on and so forth.
27
tons, it occupied a full room essentially.
It was not even as powerful as a small computer
that you have on a smart phone nowadays.
But, that was the first electronic machine
essentially.
..
So, with that we come to the end of the first
part which is the mechanical side of this
thing.
So, will take a small break and come back
with the second question which is the
motion of mind and philosophy; how do the
motion of mind come back in philosophy.
So, we will stop for a while and then we will
start in about 3 or 4 minutes essentially.
.
