Artificial Intelligence For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4

Pioneering Specialized Hardware

IN THIS CHAPTER

Using standard hardware

Using specialized hardware

Improving your hardware

Interacting with the environment

In Chapter 1, you discover that one of the reasons for the failure of early AI efforts was a lack of suitable hardware. The hardware just couldn’t perform tasks quickly enough for even mundane needs, much less something as complex as simulating human thought. This issue is described at some length in the movie The Imitation Game (see the description at Amazon.com), in which Alan Turing finally cracked the Enigma code by cleverly looking for a particular phrase, “Heil Hitler,” in each message. Without that particular flaw in the way that operators used the Enigma, the computer equipment that Turing used would never have worked fast enough to solve the problem (and the movie had no small amount of griping about the matter). If anything, the historical account — what little of it is fully declassified — shows that Turing’s problems were more profound than the movie expressed (see “Cracking the Uncrackable” at ScienceABC.com ...