PATTERN RECOGNITION BY MACHINE Oliver

Can a machine think? The answer to this old chestnut is certainly "yes": Computers have been made to play chess and checkers, to prove theorems, to solve intricate problems of strategy. Yet the intelligence implied by such activities has an elusive, unnatural quality. It is not based on any orderly development of cognitive skills. In particular, the machines are not well equipped to select from their environment the things, or the relations, they are going to think about. In this they are sharply distinguished from intelligent living organisms. Every child learns to analyze speech into meaningful patterns long before he can prove any propositions. Computers can find proofs, but they cannot understand the simplest spoken instructions. Even the earliest computers could do arithmetic superbly, but only very recently have they begun to read the written digits that a child recognizes before he learns to add them. Understanding speech and reading print are examples of a basic intellectual skill that can variously be called cognition, abstraction or perception; perhaps the best general termfor it is patternrecognition. Except for their inability to recognize patterns, machines (or, more accurately, the programs that tell machines what to do) have now met most of the classic criteria of intelligence that skeptics have proposed. They can outperform their designers: The checker-playing program devised by Arthur L. Samuel of International Business Machines Corporation (1959a) usually beats him. They are original: The "Logic Theorist," a creation of a group from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the RAND Corporation [Newell, Simon, and Shaw (1956a, 19576)] has found proofs for many of the theorems in Principia Mathematica, the