A chess-playing machine.

For centuries philosophers and scientists have speculated about whether or not the human brain is essentially a machine. Could a machine be designed that would be capable of “thinking”? During the past decade several large-scale electronic computing machines have been constructed which are capable of something very close to the reasoning process. These new computers were designed primarily to carry out purely numerical calculations. They perform automatically a long sequence of additions, multiplications, and other arithmetic operations at a rate of thousands per second. The basic design of these machines is so general and flexible, however, that they can be adapted to work symbolically with elements representing words, propositions, or other conceptual entities.