It is doubtful that there has ever been a machine more revered,

          and, at the  same  time,  feared,  than  the  computer.  In 1933,

          Samuel Butler described  a  fictional civil war btween machinists

          and non-machinists  in the anti-utopian novel Erewhon and Erewhon
                                                        Erewhon and Erewhon

          Revisited, speculating that
          Revisited

               "there is no security  against the ultimate development
               of  mechanical  consciousness in the fact  of  machines
               possessing little consciousness now."


          1
             In the movie, "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY", a nearly-human computer

          named HAL wreaked havoc among the astronauts on  his  spacecraft.

          Time magazine once named the computer  its  "Man  of  the  Year."
          ____

          Therein lies the conflict in our attitudes  towards  computers  -

          man's desire  to  push  his scientific knowledge to its limits in

          creating,  God-like,  a  machine  with  artificial  intelligence,

          ----------

          1. Butler, Samuel The Book of Machines, London, 1933.
                            ___ ____ __ ________



                                        - 1 -










          versus his fear of creating a monster,  or perhaps even worse, an

          equal.  Nevertheless, the  quest  for  artificial intelligence is

          based  on  research  into,   and   appreciation   of,  man's  own

          intelligence combined with the speed and accuracy of machines.





          1 Adapting Human Intelligence to Computers
          __________________________________________



            When computers first entered the scene, they were basically the

          large  equivalents  of today's pocket calculators,  with  greater

          memory  abilities.   They  did  none of the  complex,  diagnostic

          tasks, such as making medical judgements or giving  locations  of

          potential oil strikes, among other things, that they are commonly

          used  for  today.   Nevertheless,  the  possibility  of  advanced

          artificial intelligence was  a  controversial  concept even then,

          and  A.  M.  Turing  invented  a  test  wherein   a  human  would

          interrogate both another human and a computer via  teletype.   If

          the computer could so completely imitate the human  as to confuse

          the other human,  it  would  be  considered  to  show  artificial

          intelligence.  This brings up a problem, however, because of  its

          assumption that  there  is only one type of thought, and in order

          to be intelligent, a machine must do everything  exactly as brain

          processes would.  Now,  of  course  a  human  could  recognize  a

          computer  because  of  its  extraordinarily  fast   computational

          abiliity, but this does not preclude its being  intelligent.   It

          was this s