Meeting the Pretercomputer and the Pseudo-Computer (1956 and 1963)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2767

In just a few minutes of browsing in a pile by the desk last night I came across three terrific titles of papers, two of which used terminology I had never encountered before. The papers were on "pretercomputers" and "pseudocomputers", with a third using familiar terms in a very unfamiliar pairing, "uneconomical robots". Finding all three from two slender sources within that time frame was a real eyebrow-raiser.

The first work was found in a loose issue of  the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery  (April 1956, vol 2/no. 3, pp 65-73): Robert Perkins' “EASIAC¹, a Pseudo-Computer”. It seems that the EASIAC (EASy Instruction Automatic Computer) was developed to make it easier for a newbie to program a computer, or at least easier to program compared to the MIDAC ( Michigan Digital Automatic Computer) with which it was associated.  (The MIDAC was developed by the  Willow Run Research Center of the Engineer­ing Research Institute, U Michigan, the first digital automatic computer in the Midwest.)

Next in the pile was a 1963 issue of Cybernetica², and the first title in that issue leapt from the page: C.K. Gordon, Jr.'s “In defense of the Search for the Pretercomputer”. Gordon seems to be looking for foundations of some next level of computer (“preter”=”praeter”, Latin for “beyond”, or past what is normal), writing on machine thinking, and “awareness”, and an approach to expression of thought by a computer in a “preter-linguistic response”(?).  I rushed to the conclusion of the paper where the author states that ”much mathematical groundwork has been laid in logically demonstrating the constructibility of certain types of automata” citing work by Burkes, Culbertson, Kleene, Minsky, McCulloch/Pitts, Turing, Uttley, von Neumann, and others. He also points out the “construction of a number of rudimentary devices, showing their learning behavior and a remarkable degree of adaptability” by Ashby, Chapman, Miner, Pask, Shannon, Uttley and Walter.

Checking out the bibliography for this paper I found this delightful-sounding title of what I think is a semi-famous work by James T. Culbertson, "Some Uneconomical Robots". The paper was published in Shannon and McCarthy's Princeton Studies series Automata Studies, which unlike the other two papers mentioned in this post was at least one that I had seen before, a noteworthy effort in a volume of noteworthy efforts.  (Culbertson also wrote a paper called "Hypothetical Robots" in 1952, plus The Minds of Robots (1963, U of Illinois), in which he makes a philosophical case for there being some at least low-level consciousness in everything, and therefore the same is true for machines.)  I've determined that I don't have this volume of the Princeton series, nor can I find it (yet) online, and although there are some strong references to the paper I haven't yet found much to tell me of its contents, though I did find Herbert Keller (in his "Finite Automata, Pattern Recognition and Perceptrons" in the JACM in 1960) describe it as arithmetic and "fanciful". ³ I realize I've said nothing yet about the Culbertson, but my time allowed on this post--like the robo-cops tracking down Robert Duvall's character in THX-1138--has run out. I'll return to this post and extend it shortly.

Readers of my post this morning may be thinking these papers are far less extraordinary-sounding than I found them to be, especially finding them in such rapid succession. I don't do all that much work in the history of computers, so to a more-general history of science person like myself these titles were captivating, burnished with a deep golden hue of possible whimsical and sci-fi interpretations...the possibilities there are endless.  It was a funny little adventure that was populated with many extensions and absorbing titles that begged to be pulled out-of-context. They seemed on one hand to be the stuff of speculative history of the future material--except of course they were far more "real" than that. 

Notes:

1.  Abstract: "One of the primary functions of the MIDAC installation at the University of Michigan is the instruction of beginners in the various aspects of digital machine use including programming and coding. ... In conducting these courses it was soon found to be extremely difficult, in five or six instruction periods, to bring a complete newcomer up to the point where he can code and check out on MIDAC anything more than a rather trivial routine. As might be expected the difficulty centers around problems of scaling, instruction modification and binary representation. ... To alleviate these problems it was decided that a new computer was needed: one designed to make programming easier. At the cost of some of MIDAC's speed and capacity plus two or three man-months of programming time EASIAC, the EASy Instruction Automatic Computer, was realized as a translation- interpretation program in MIDAC. Autocoder for the Michigan U Midac."--https://hopl.info/showlanguage.prx?exp=63

2. Cybernetica, Namur,  Vol VI, no. 2, 1963.

3.  In his disarticulation of AI, Henry Dreyfus ( (What Computers Can and Can't Do, 1972, Harper & Row) quotes Culbertson's paper: “Using suitable receptors and effectors we can connect them together via central cells. If we could get enough central cells and if they were small enough and if each cell had enough endbulbs and if we could put enough bulbs at each synapse and if we had time enough to assemble them, then we could construct robots to satisfy any given input-output specification, i.e., we could construct robots that would behave in any way we desired under any environmental circumstances. There would be no difficulty in constructing a robot with behavioral properties just like John Jones or Henry Smith or in constructing a robot with any desired behavioral improvements over Jones and Smith.” And: “Or put more baldly: Since [these complete robots] can, in principle, satisfy any given input-output specifications, they can do any prescribed things under any prescribed circumstances ingeniously solve problems, compose symphonies, create works of art and literature and engineering, and pursue any goals.”

4. Another great title found in this volume of  Shannon/McCarthy is Ross Ashby's  "Design for an Intelligence-amplifier" which discussed how to generate creativity in machines.