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"The best fuzzy rules, the best knowledge, deal with the turning points of the system. If a race-car driver teaches you how to drive, you don't need him to show you how to drive on the straightaway. It's how he handles the curves that matters."
- Bart Kosko
 |
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. |
| 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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'A worker replaced by a nubot... had to be compensated.'
'... forcing the energy transfer which allowed him to regrow his lost fingers.'
'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
