16-hour day by the world’s inhabitants, making ours a noisy planet
indeed. To bear out the “noisy” connotation, someone else has reckoned
that only about 1 per cent of the sounds we make are real information.
The rest are extraneous, incidentally telling us the sex of the speaker,
whether or not he has a cold, the state of his upper plate, and so on.
It is perhaps a blessing that most of these trillions of words vanish
almost as soon as they are spoken. The printed word, however, isn’t so
transient; it not only hangs around, but also piles up as well. The pile
is ever deeper, technical writings alone being enough to fill seven
24-volume encyclopedias each day, according to one source. As with our
speech, perhaps only 1 per cent of this outpouring of print is of real
importance, but this does not necessarily make what some have called the
Information Explosion any less difficult to cope with.
The letters IR once stood for infra-red; but in the last year or so they
have been appropriated by the words “information retrieval,” one of the
biggest bugaboos on the scientific horizon. It amounts to saving
ourselves from drowning in the fallout from typewriters all over the
earth. There are those cool heads who decry the pushing of the panic
button, professing to see no exponential increase in literature, but a
steady 8 per cent or so each year. The button-pushers see it
differently, and they can document a pretty strong case. The technical
community is suffering an embarrassment of riches in the publications
field.
While a doubling in the output of technical literature has taken the
last twelve years or so, the next such increase is expected in half that
time. Perhaps the strongest indication that IR is a big problem is the
obvious fact that nobody really knows just how much has been, is being,
or will be written. For instance, one authority claims technical
material is being amassed at the rate of 2,000 pages a minute, which
would result in far more than the seven sets of encyclopedias mentioned
earlier. No one seems to know for sure how many technical journals there
are in the world; it can be “pinpointed” somewhere between 50,000 and
100,000. Selecting one set of figures at random, we learn that in 1960
alone 1,300,000 different technical articles were published in 60,000
journals. Of course there were also 60,000 books on technical subjects,
plus many thousands of technical reports that did not make the formal
journals, but still might contain the vital bit of information without
which a breakthrough will be put off, or a war lost. Our research
expenses in the United States ran about $13 billion in 1960, and the
guess is they will more than double by 1970. An important part of
research should be done in the library, of course, lest our scientist
spend his life re-inventing the wheel, as the saying goes.
To back up this saying are specific examples. For instance, a scientific
project costing $250,000 was completed a few days before an engineer
came across practically the identical work in a report in the library.
This was a Russian report incidentally, titled “The Application of
Boolean Matrix Algebra to the Analysis and Synthesis of Relay Contact
Networks.” In another, happier case, information retrieval saved Esso
Research & Engineering Co. a month of work and many thousands of dollars
when an alert—or lucky—literature searcher came across a Swedish
scientist’s monograph detailing Esso’s proposed exploration. Another
literature search obviated tests of more than a hundred chemical
compounds. Unfortunately not all researchers do or can search the
literature in all cases. There is even a tongue-in-cheek law which
governs this phenomenon—“Mooer’s” Law states, “An information system
will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful for a customer to
have information than for him not to have it.”
As a result, it has been said that if a research project costs less than
$100,000 it is cheaper to go ahead with it than to conduct a rigorous
search of the literature. Tongue in cheek or not, this state of affairs
points up the need for a usable information retrieval system. _Fortune_
magazine reports that 10 per cent of research and development expense
could be saved by such a system, and 10 per cent in 1960, remember,
would have amounted to $1.3 billion. Thus the prediction that IR will be
a $100 million business in 1965 does not seem out of line.
The Center for Documentation at Western Reserve University spends about
$6-1/2 simply in acquiring and storing a single article in its files. In
1958 it could search only thirty abstracts of these articles in an hour
and realized that more speed was vital if the Center was to be of value.
As a result, a GE 225 computer IR system was substituted. Now
researchers go through the entire store of literature—about 50,000
documents in 1960—in thirty-five minutes, answering up to fifty
questions for “customers.”
[Illustration:
_International Business Machines Corp._
The document file of this WALNUT information retrieval system contains
the equivalent of 3,000 books. A punched-card inquiry system locates
the desired filmstrip for viewing or photographic reproduction.
]
[Illustration:
_International Business Machines Corp._
This image converter of the WALNUT system optically reduces and
transfers microfilm to filmstrips for storage. Each strip contains
99 document images. As a document image is transferred from
microfilm to filmstrip, the image converter simultaneously assigns
image file addresses and punches these addresses into punched cards
controlling the conversion process.
]
The key to information retrieval lies in efficient abstracting. It has
been customary to let people do this task in the past because there was
no other way of getting it done. Unfortunately, man does not do a
completely objective job of either preparing or using the abstract, and
the result is a two-ended guessing game that wastes time and loses facts
in the process. A machine abstracting system, devised by H. Peter Luhn
of IBM, picks the words that appear most often and uses them as keys to
reduce articles to usable, concise abstracts. A satisfactory solution
seems near and will be a big step toward a completely computerized IR
system.
For several years there has been a running battle between the computer
IR enthusiast and the die-hard “librarian” type who claims that
information retrieval is not amenable to anything but the human touch.
It is true that adapting the computer to the task of information
retrieval did not prove as simple as was hoped. But detractors are in
much the same fix as the man with a shovel trying to build a dike
against an angry rising sea, who scoffs at the scoop-shovel operator
having trouble starting his engine. The wise thing to do is drop the
shovel and help the machine. There will be a marriage of both types of
retrieval, but Verner Clapp, president of the Washington, D.C., Council
on Library Resources, stated at an IR symposium that computers offer the
best chance of keeping up with the flood of information.
One sophisticated approach to IR uses symbolic logic, the forte of the
digital computer. In a typical _reductio ad logic_, the following
request for information:
An article in English concerning aircraft or spacecraft, written neither
before 1937 or after 1957; should deal with laboratory tests leading to
conclusions on an adhesive used to bond metal to rubber or plastic; the
adhesive must not become brittle with age, must not absorb plasticizer
from the rubber adherent, and must have a peel-strength of 20 lbs/in; it
must have at least one of these properties—no appreciable solution in
fuel and no absorption of solvent.
becomes the logical statement:
KKaVbcPdeCfg, and KAhiKKKNjNklSmn.
Armed with this symbolic abbreviation, the computer can dig quickly into
its memory file and come up with the sought-for article or articles.
It has been suggested that the abstracting technique be applied at the
opposite end of the cycle with a vengeance amounting to birth control of
new articles. A Lockheed Electronics engineer proposes a technical
library that not only accepts new material, but also rejects any that is
_not_ new. Here, of course, we may be skirting danger of the type risked
by human birth control exponents—that of unwittingly depriving the world
of a president, or a powerful scientific finding. Perhaps the screening,
the function of “garbage disposal,” as one blunt worker puts it, should
be left as an after-the-fact measure.
Despite early setbacks, the computer is making progress in the job of
information retrieval. Figures of a 300 per cent improvement in
efficiency in this new application are cited over the last several
years. Operation HAYSTAQ, a Patent Office project in the chemical patent
section accounting for one-fifth of all patents, showed a 50 per cent
improvement in search speed and 100 per cent in accuracy as a result of
using automated methods. Desk-size computer systems with solid-state
circuits are being offered for information retrieval.
The number of scientific information centers in this country, starting
with one in 1830, reached 59 in 1940 and now stands at 144.
Significantly, of 2,000 scientists and engineers working at these
centers, 381 are computer people.
Some representative information retrieval applications making good use
of computer techniques are the selection of the seven astronauts for the
Mercury Project from thousands of jet pilots, Procter & Gamble’s
Technical Information Service, demonstration of an electronic law
library to the American Bar Association, and Food Machinery and Chemical
Corporation’s Central Research Laboratory. The National Science
Foundation, the National Bureau of Standards, and the U.S. Patent Office
are among the government agencies in addition to the military services
that are interested in electronic information retrieval.
_Summary_
The impact of the computer on education, language and communication, and
the handling of information is obviously already strongly felt. These
inroads will be increased, and progress hastened in the years ahead of
us. Perhaps of the greatest importance is the assigning to the machine
functions closer to the roots of all these things. Rather than simply
read or translate language, for example, the computer seems destined to
improve on it. The same applies to the process of teaching and to the
storage and retrieval of data. The electronic computer has shown that it
is not a passive piece of equipment, but active and dynamic in nature.
It will soon be as much a part of the classroom and library as books;
one day it may take the place of books themselves.
[Illustration:
Lichty, © _Field Enterprises, Inc._
“How come they spend over a million on our new school, Miss Finch, and
then forget to put in computer machines?”
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“_’Tis one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has
sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly
conclude as to both the future and the past._”
—Montaigne
11: The Road Ahead
In Book One of _Les Miserables_, Cosette says, “Would you realize what
Revolution is, call it Progress; and would you realize what Progress is,
call it Tomorrow.” Victor Hugo’s definitions apply well to what has been
termed by some the computer revolution and by others simply the natural
evolution of species. The computer has a past and a present,
differentiated mainly by the slope of the line plotting progress against
time. Its future, which blurs somewhat with the present, will obviously
be characterized by a line approaching the vertical.
The intelligent machine has been postulated for years, first by the
scientist, then by the science-fiction writer, and now again by the
scientist. Norbert Wiener of cybernetics fame, Ashby and his homeostat,
Grey Walter and his mechanical turtles, A. M. Turing, John von Neumann,
and others, have recently been joined by men like Ramo, Samuel, Newell,
_et al._, who, if not actually beating the drums for machine
intelligence, do more than admit to the possibility. For each such pro
there are cons, of course, from sincere, intelligent authorities who in
effect holler “Get a horse!” at those who say the computer is coming.
The Royal Society in England met its stiffest opposition from otherwise
intelligent people who deplored naturalism in any form. Perhaps such
detractors are a necessary goad, a part of progress. At any rate,
science survived the Nicholas Gimcrack jibes of the Popes and Addisons
and Swifts. Darwin was more right than Butler, though the latter
probably made more money from his work. Today, we find a parallel
situation in that there are those who refuse to accept the computer as
an intelligent machine, though it is interesting to watch these
objectors regroup and draw another line the machine dare not go past.
The writers of science and pseudo-science have often been accused of
fantasy and blue-sky dreams. A case in point in the electronics field is
the so-called “journalistor” or marvelous successor to the transistor.
Such riding off in all directions with each new laboratory experiment
may be justified in that it prods the scientist who must keep up with
the press and his advertising department! This theory apparently works,
and now it seems that the most startling and fantastic stories come not
from writers, but from the scientists themselves.
In 1960 the Western Joint Computer Conference was held in San Francisco,
and one session was devoted to the fanciful design and use of a computer
with the problem-solving capability of an intelligent man and the speed
and capacity of a high-speed data-processor. It was proposed to use
“tunnel-effect tetrodes” with a switching time of one ten-billionth of a
second as the logic and storage elements. These would be fabricated of
thin-film materials by electron beam micromachining, and 100 billion of
them could be packed into a cubic inch volume. With these tiny
components and new circuit modes a supercomputer could be built, stored
with information, and programmed to solve what one of the participants
called the most difficult problem the human being faces today—that of
bargaining.
This computer has not yet been built; it won’t be for some time. But
design and fabrication are moving in that direction on a number of
fronts. One of these fronts is that of hardware, the components used in
building up the computer circuitry. In a decade we moved from vacuum
tubes to transistors to thin-film devices. Examples of shrinkage on a
gross scale are shown in the use of a single ferrite core to replace
some twenty conventional (relatively speaking!) components.
Memory circuits once were mechanical relays or tube circuits. Briefly
they were transistorized, and then ferrite cores. Magnetic thin-film
circuits have now been developed, making random-access storage almost as
compact as the sequential tape reel. As circuits grow smaller the major
problem is manipulating them, or even seeing them, and a sneeze can be
disastrous in today’s electronics plant.
One early journalistor was the molecular circuit. Many scientists and
engineers working in the field scoffed at or derided such a visionary
scheme. But the industry has indeed progressed into the
integrated-circuit technology—a sort of halfway point—and is now on the
fringe of actual functional block techniques in which the individual
components are not discernible. Electronic switching and other action at
the molecular level is close to reality, and hardheaded scientists now
speak calmly of using a homogeneous block of material as a memory,
scanning its three dimensions with the speed of light to locate any one
or more of billions of bits of data in a few inches of volume.
Writing on the head of a pin was a prophetic bit of showmanship, and
pinhead-size computers will not necessarily have pinhead mentalities.
This progress toward a seemingly hopeless goal takes on an inexorable
quality when the writings of von Neumann are compared with the state of
the art today. Starting out much faster but much larger than similar
elements of the brain, computer components have been made even faster
while simultaneously shrinking dramatically toward the dimensions
necessary to produce quantitative equivalence. It happens that these
goals work out well together, the one helping the other. Circuitry is
now at the point where speed is ultimately dependent on that limiter of
all physical activity, the speed of light, or of electrons through a
conductor. Only by putting elements closer together can speed be
increased; thus one quality is not achieved at the sacrifice of the
other.
[Illustration:
_International Business Machines Corp._
This experimental “memory plane” consists of 135 cryotron devices
built up in a 19-layer “sandwich.” Produced automatically, it is an
example of continued shrinking of computer elements.
]
As an example of the progress being made toward speeding up computers,
speakers at the recent Winter General Meeting of the American Institute
of Electrical Engineers described a coming generation of “gigacycle”
computers now on the drawing boards. Present electronic machines operate
at speeds in the megacycle range, with 50 million cycles per second
representing the most advanced state of the art. Giga means billion;
thus the new round of computers will be some thousand times as fast as
those now operating.
Among the firms who plan such ultraspeed computers are RCA, IBM, and
Sperry Rand Corporation. To achieve such a great increase in speed
requires faster electronic switches. Transistors have been improved, and
more exotic devices such as tunnel diodes, thin-film cryotrons, magnetic
thin-films, parametrons, and traveling-wave tubes are now coming into
use. Much of the development work is being supported by the U.S. Bureau
of Ships. Operational gigacycle computers are expected within two years!
Not just the brickmaker, but the architect too has been busy in the job
of optimizing the computer. The science of bionics and the study of
symbolic logic lead to better ways of doing things. The computer itself
comes up with improvements for its next generation, making one part do
the work of five, and eliminating the need for whole sections of
circuitry. Most computers have a fixed “clock”; that is, they operate at
a certain cyclic rate. Now appearing on the scene are “asynchronous”
computers which don’t stand around waiting when one job is done, as
their predecessors did.
One advanced notion is the “growing” of complex electronic circuitry, in
which a completed amplifier, or array of amplifiers, is pulled from the
crystal furnace much the way material for transistors is now grown.
Pooh-poohed at first as ridiculous, the notion has been tried
experimentally. Since a computer is basically a multiplicity of simple
units, the idea is not far off at that. It is conceivable that crystal
structure can be exploited to produce millions of molecules of the
proper material properly aligned for the desired electronic action.
With this shrinking come the benefits of small size, low power
consumption, low cost, and perhaps lower maintenance. The computer will
be cheap enough for applications not now economically feasible. As this
happens, what will the computer do for us tomorrow?
A figure of 7 per cent is estimated for the amount of paperwork the
computer has taken over in the business world. Computer men are eyeing a
market some five times that amount. It does not take a vivid imagination
to decide that such a percentage is perhaps conservative in the extreme.
Computer sales themselves promise to show a fourfold increase in the
five-year period from 1960 to 1965, and in the past predictions have
been exceeded many times.
As population grows and business expands in physical size and
complexity, it is obvious that the computer and its data-processing
ability will be called upon more and more. There is another factor, that
of the internationalizing of business. Despite temporary setbacks of
war, protective tariffs, insular tendencies, and the like, in the long
run we will live in one integrated world shrunk by data links that can
get information from here to there and back again so fast it will be
like conversing with someone across the room. Already planners are
talking worldwide computerized systems.
As a mathematical whiz, the computer will relieve us of our money
worries. Coupled with the credit card, perhaps issued to us at birth, a
central computer will permit us to make purchases anywhere in the world
and to credit our account with wages and other income. If we try to
overdraw, it may even flash a warning light as fast as we put the card
in the slot! This project interests General Dynamics researchers.
Of more importance than merely doing bookkeeping is the impact the
computer will have on the planning and running of businesses. Although
it is found in surveys that every person thinks computer application
reaches to the level just below his in the management structure, pure
logic should ultimately win out over man’s emotional frailties at all
levels. Operations research, implemented by the computer, will make for
more efficient businesses. Decisions will increasingly be made not by
vice-presidents but by digital computers. At first we will have to
gather the necessary information for these electronic oracles, but in
time they will take over this function themselves.
Business is tied closely to education, and we have had a hint of the
place the computer will make for itself in education. The effect on our
motivation to learn of the little need for much learning will be
interesting. But then, is modern man a weaker being because he kills a
tiger with a high-powered rifle instead of club or bare hands—or has no
need to kill the tiger in the first place?
After having proved itself as a patent searcher, the computer is sure to
excel as inventor. It will invade the artistic field; computers have
already produced pleasing patterns of light. Music has felt the effect
of the computer; the trend will continue. Some day not far off the hi-fi
enthusiast will turn on his set and hear original compositions one after
the other, turned out by the computer in as regular or random form as
the hearer chooses to set the controls. Each composition will bring the
thrill of a new, fresh experience, unless we choose to go back in the
computer’s memory for the old music.
The computer will do far more in the home than dream up random music for
listening pleasure. The recorded telephone answerer will give way to one
that can speak for us, making appointments and so on, and remembering to
bring us up to date when we get home. A small computer to plug in the
wall may do other things like selecting menus and making food purchases
for next week, planning our vacations, and helping the youngsters with
their homework. It is even suggested that the computer may provide us
with child-guidance help, plus psychological counsel for ourselves and
medical diagnoses for the entire family. The entire house might be
computerized, able to run itself without human help—even after people
are gone, as in the grimly prophetic story by Ray Bradbury in which a
neat self-controlled home is shown as the curtains part in the morning.
A mechanical sweeper runs about gathering up dust, the air conditioning,
lighting, and entertainment are automatic, all oblivious to the fact
that one side of the house is blackened from the blast of a bomb.