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"it slowly dawned on me that the landscape of science is maybe what interests people a great deal in science fiction."
- Gregory Benford
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| Artificial Brain | ||
| A non-organic device structured like a human brain. |
This is a very early use of this idea. Note that the "brain-stuff" is structured like the brain.
| No doubt it was a startling proposition, to construct an artificial brain that would possess consciousness, memory, reasoning power...
...Detmold had attacked the problem from a different standpoint. It was his theory that the sensations of the nervous system are flashed to the brain as electric currents, or vibrations, and that it was the action of these vibratory currents on the brain-stuff that caused consciousness and thought. Thus, instead of trying to make simple, living cells and from them work up the complicated structure of the brain, he had constructed an organ, a brain, of metal, entirely inorganic and lifeless, yet whose atomic structure he claimed was analogous to the atomic structure of a living brain. He had then applied countless different electrical vibrations to this metallic brain-stuff, and finally announced that under vibrations of certain frequencies the organ had showed faint signs of consciousness. |
| Technovelgy from The Metal Giants,
by Edmond Hamilton. Published by Weird Tales in 1926 Additional resources -
|
Here are more details:
It was very simple in appearance, resembling an egg of black metal, some ten inches in length. Inset in its jupper surface was a small lens of glass, and leading into each end of the thing were three wires, which were connected to a complicated tangle of electrical apparatus on the other side of the room.
Compare to the neuristor brain from Home is the Hangman, a 1976 novella by Roger Zelazny, and of course neuristors from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the 1966 novel by Robert Heinlein.
...he turned to a table on which rested the artificial brain.
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Metal Giants
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and Technology by Edmond Hamilton
Tech news articles related to The Metal Giants
Tech news articles related to works by Edmond Hamilton
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- Nanowire Memristor Networks Form 'Brains'
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- Neuromorphic Computing Hardare
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
