“Computers were within my sphere of attention, but only computers used as number crunchers. In spite of the "giant brain" metaphor, there is little suggestion in this 1950 talk that the most important application of computers might lie in imitating intelligence symbolically, not numerically.”

Source: 1980s and later, Models of my life, 1991, p. 199.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Computers were within my sphere of attention, but only computers used as number crunchers. In spite of the "giant brain…" by Herbert A. Simon?
Herbert A. Simon photo
Herbert A. Simon 58
American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and p… 1916–2001

Related quotes

Yuval Noah Harari photo
Douglas Adams photo

“I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires TV program (1996) http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part1.html

“[Computers] are developing so rapidly that even computer scientists cannot keep up with them. It must be bewildering to most mathematicians and engineers… In spite of the diversity of the applications, the methods of attacking the difficult problems with computers show a great unity, and the name of Computer Sciences is being attached to the discipline as it emerges. It must be understood, however, that this is still a young field whose structure is still nebulous. The student will find a great many more problems than answers.”

George Forsythe (1917–1972) Stanford University computer scientist

George Forsythe (1961) "Engineering students must learn both computing and mathematics". J. Eng. Educ. 52 (1961), p. 177. as cited in ( Knuth, 1972 http://www.stanford.edu/dept/ICME/docs/history/forsythe_knuth.pdf) According to Donald Knuth in this quote Forsythe coined the term "computer science".

Stephen Wolfram photo

“Computational reducibility may well be the exception rather than the rule: Most physical questions may be answerable only through irreducible amounts of computation. Those that concern idealized limits of infinite time, volume, or numerical precision can require arbitrarily long computations, and so be formally undecidable.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

[Undecidability and intractability in theoretical physics, Physical Review Letters, 54, 8, 1985, 735–738, 10.1103/PhysRevLett.54.735, https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/undecidability-intractability-theoretical-physics.pdf]

Alan Turing photo

“It was not easy to have the imagination to foresee that computers were to become one of the most important developments of the century.”

James H. Wilkinson (1919–1986) English mathematician

Oral history interview http://history.siam.org/wilkinson.htm by John C. Nash, SIAM History of Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Project http://history.siam.org/,13 July 1984
Context: Very belatedly in 1947, Darwin [Sir Charles Darwin, great-grandson of the famous Charles Darwin] agreed to set up a very small electronics group [... ] It was not easy to have the imagination to foresee that computers were to become one of the most important developments of the century.

Rob Pike photo

“Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing.”

Rob Pike (1956) software engineer

Rob Pike (2004) comment in comp.os.plan9 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.plan9/msg/006fec195aeeff15 group at groups.google.com, 02-03-04

“From the computer application point of view the primary problem [of Computer-Aided Design] is not how to solve problems, but how to state them.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: Computer-Aided Design: A Statement of Objectives (1960), p. iii; Abstract.

“The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers (1962) Preface

Related topics