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"I started writing in the 1930's when I was eighteen years old. And deep inside me I'm still eighteen and it's still 1938."
- Isaac Asimov
 |
What is the secret behind a star unique in all the known cosmos?
| "Please go on, sir," Darby invited quickly, with a spark of pity for the old man. "I haven't heard the
full story of Old Unfaithful. Besides, I have time to kill while Brains wrestles with his homework."
Darby grinned and patted his machine. He was the technician handling the electronic brain that digested all the observatory's cosmic equations. "Brains" clacked and hissed beside him, working madly at the moment on a complex problem of red shifts. While his ingenious mechanical partner labored, Darby was at leisure.
 (Artwork showing Brains from The Cosmic Blinker) "Brains over there — the electronic brain. He solves every other problem in galactic astronomy, many of them staggering to the human mind. We just feed him the data and he does the rest. Brains can crack the code, I'm sure. Translating the language will be tougher, but he'll do it." Brains was not a giant computer. It was no more than ten feet wide. But it was packed with mental might. Countless tiny transistors and incredible mazes of synaptic relays and spongy centers of metallic cells added up to a thousand human minds. And Brains had not yet met a celestial riddle that it could not solve within twenty-four hours. |
| Technovelgy from The Cosmic Blinker,
by Eando Binder. Published by Science Fiction Plus in 1953 Additional resources -
|
A relatively early example of a computer that can solve specific, complex problems that would challenge even human experts.
Compare to Multivac from Franchise (1955) by Isaac Asimov and the Central Computer from The City and the Stars (1956) by Arthur C. Clarke.
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'The pitiless M rays pierced Earth and steel and densest concrete as if they were so much transparent glass...'
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'
'Nanny is different,' Tom Fields murmured... 'she's not like a machine. She's like a person.'
'We made a crude , small cell and were delighted - and, I admit, somewhat surprised - to find it worked.'
'...we've promised him a generous pension from the royalties.'
'The clothes and jewelery drew their tiny power requirements from her movements.'
'At the end of each appendage's eight fingers there are tinier appendages...'
'We want to do something to help those who are suffering from tooth loss or absence,' said lead researcher Katsu Takahashi.
