As I See It: Old Hephaestus Had A Bot, A.I.A.I.O.
April 28, 2014 Victor Rozek
|
In 1956, Nathan Rochester approached the Rockefeller Foundation to apply for a princely grant of $7,000. He said he wanted to throw a little shindig at Dartmouth University, where the minds of mathematicians and computer scientists could run free exploring what must have seemed like a fanciful and distant notion at the time–the creation of intelligent machines. He probably would have been dismissed outright, but Rochester was no garden-variety, star-struck futurist. He also happened to be the chief engineer of the IBM 701–the first general purpose, mass-produced computer–and therefore had the requisite gravitas to pacify the normally conservative moneymen. By |
