Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
7. If the opponent cannot win with the next move, then the automa-
ton must look ahead successive moves to find moves that will allow
it to win.
Babbage's writings on the mechanisation of Chess represent hardly a drop
in the ocean of today's Chess programming techniques. Nevertheless, he
did have the foresight, just over a century before the first Chess program
was written, to realise that a machine could be made to play a com-
plete game of Chess. He appreciated that such a machine would need to
perform a large number of calculations during the analytical process for
each move, and he humbly accepted that not even his Analytical Engine
would be able to calculate a Chess move in a reasonable amount of time.
Babbage's designs had an enormous impact by demonstrating that a
mechanical system could perform what appeared to be intelligent opera-
tions, and he is rightly regarded as one of the founders of computing.
Nineteenth-Century Logic Machines
Two nineteenth-century inventors made significant advances on Stan-
hope's work. William Jevons (1835-1882) was an English academic
whose first attempt at building a logic machine resulted in the construc-
tion of a special type of abacus as an aid to teach logic. It “consists
of a common school blackboard placed in a sloping position and fur-
nished with four horizontal and equidistant ledges”. [3] Jevons devised a
method of representing the terms of a syllogism by thin wooden rectan-
gles with letters and symbols on them and with short steel pins inserted
into them. Each rectangle represented one of the possible combinations
of an expression with four terms, for example:
(Not A is true) (B is true) (C is true) (D is true)
The location of a pin in its rectangle indicated whether the corresponding
term was positive (true) or negative (false). A complex logical expression
could be constructed from these rectangles on the uppermost ledge of his
abacus, and Jevons developed a mechanical method that allowed him to
simplify the complex expression by moving, in one operation, all those
rectangles that contained a particular combination of symbols (for exam-
ple, all those containing “Not A”). But although Jevons could teach the
simplification of logic expressions using his abacus, the successful use of
the device depended on the user understanding the process, which was
quite complicated.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search