CHAPTER 1
The Thinking Machine
CLOSE YOUR EYES and imagine a purple cow. Now close your eyes and imagine a yellow cow. Where did these thoughts come from? How did they get there? Is there a place in your brain that stores cow images, and another with an inventory of paint cans with which to color them? These are important questions, because before we can create something that thinks, we must understand how we think.
Supercomputers can search billions of records in a fraction of a second. They can remember hundreds of billions of facts perfectly. They can even power up their electric circuits to react at least a million times as fast as the neurons in our brains.
Pretty smart, huh? So all we have to do is build more of those industrial-size microprocessor ...
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