The Information (86 page)
♦
“INFORMATION CAN BE CONSIDERED AS ORDER”
: Heinz von Foerster, ed.,
Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems: Transactions of the Eighth Conference, March 15–16, 1951
(New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1952), xiii.
♦
HIS NEIGHBOR SAID
: Heinz von Foerster, ed.,
Transactions of the Seventh Conference
, 151.
♦
“WHEN THE MACHINE WAS TURNED OFF”
: Heinz von Foerster, ed.,
Transactions of the Eighth Conference
, 173.
♦
“IT BUILDS UP A COMPLETE PATTERN OF INFORMATION”
: “Computers and Automata,” in Claude Shannon,
Collected Papers
, 706.
♦
“WHEN IT ARRIVES AT A, IT REMEMBERS”
: Heinz von Foerster, ed.
Transactions of the Eighth Conference
, 175.
♦
“LIKE A MAN WHO KNOWS THE TOWN”
: Ibid., 180.
♦
“IN REALITY IT IS THE MAZE WHICH REMEMBERS”
: Quoted in Roberto Cordeschi,
The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind, and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetics
(Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2002), 163.
♦
FOUND RESEARCHERS TO BE “WELL-INFORMED”
: Norbert Wiener,
Cybernetics
, 23.
♦
“ABOUT FIFTEEN PEOPLE WHO HAD WIENER’S IDEAS”
: John Bates to Grey Walter, quoted in Owen Holland, “The First Biologically Inspired Robots,”
Robotica
21 (2003): 354.
♦
HALF PRONOUNCED IT RAY-SHE-OH
: Philip Husbands and Owen Holland, “The Ratio Club: A Hub of British Cybernetics,” in
The Mechanical Mind in History
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 103.
♦
“A BRAIN CONSISTING OF RANDOMLY CONNECTED IMPRESSIONAL SYNAPSES”
: Ibid., 110.
♦
“THINK OF THE BRAIN AS A TELEGRAPHIC RELAY”
: “Brain and Behavior,”
Comparative Psychology Monograph
, Series 103 (1950), in Warren S. McCulloch,
Embodiments of Mind
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), 307.
♦
“I PROPOSE TO CONSIDER THE QUESTION”
: Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,”
Minds and Machines
59, no. 236 (1950): 433–60.
♦
“THE PRESENT INTEREST IN ‘THINKING MACHINES’ ”
: Ibid., 436.
♦
“SINCE BABBAGE’S MACHINE WAS NOT ELECTRICAL”
: Ibid., 439.
♦
“IN THE CASE THAT THE FORMULA IS NEITHER PROVABLE NOR DISPROVABLE”
: Alan M. Turing, “Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory,” unpublished lecture, c. 1951, in Stuart M. Shieber, ed.,
The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 105.
♦
THE ORIGINAL QUESTION, “CAN MACHINES THINK?”
: Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 442.
♦
“THE IDEA OF A MACHINE THINKING”
: Claude Shannon to C. Jones, 16 June 1952, Manuscript Div., Library of Congress, by permission of Mary E. Shannon.
♦
“
PSYCHOLOGIE
IS A DOCTRINE WHICH SEARCHES OUT”
: Translated in William Harvey,
Anatomical Exercises Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood
(London, 1653), quoted in “psychology,
n
,” draft revision Dec. 2009,
OED Online
, Oxford University Press,
http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50191636
.
♦
“THE SCIENCE OF MIND, IF IT CAN BE CALLED A SCIENCE”
:
North British Review
22 (November 1854), 181.
♦
“A LOATHSOME, DISTENDED, TUMEFIED, BLOATED, DROPSICAL MASS”
: William James to Henry Holt, 9 May 1890, quoted in Robert D. Richardson,
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 298.
♦
“YOU TALK ABOUT MEMORY”
: George Miller, dialogue with Jonathan Miller, in Jonathan Miller,
States of Mind
(New York: Pantheon, 1983), 22.
♦
“NEW CONCEPTS OF THE NATURE AND MEASURE”
: Homer Jacobson, “The Informational Capacity of the Human Ear,”
Science
112 (4 August 1950): 143–44; “The Informational Capacity of the Human Eye,”
Science
113 (16 March 1951): 292–93.
♦
A GROUP IN 1951 TESTED THE LIKELIHOOD
: G. A. Miller, G. A. Heise, and W. Lichten, “The Intelligibility of Speech as a Function of the Context of the Test Materials,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology
41 (1951): 329–35.
♦
“THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A DESCRIPTION”
: Donald E. Broadbent,
Perception and Communication
(Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1958), 31.
♦
“THE MAGICAL NUMBER SEVEN”
:
Psychological Review
63 (1956): 81–97.
♦
“THOSE WHO TAKE THE INFORMATIONAL TURN”
: Frederick Adams, “The Informational Turn in Philosophy,”
Minds and Machines
13 (2003): 495.
♦
THE MIND CAME IN ON THE BACK
: Jonathan Miller,
States of Mind
, 26.
♦
“I THINK THAT THIS PRESENT CENTURY”
: Claude Shannon, “The Transfer of Information,” talk presented at the 75th anniversary of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Reprinted by permission of Mary E. Shannon.
♦
“OUR FELLOW SCIENTISTS IN MANY DIFFERENT FIELDS”
: “The Bandwagon,” in Claude Shannon,
Collected Papers
, 462.
♦
“OUR CONSENSUS HAS NEVER BEEN UNANIMOUS”
: quoted in Steve J. Heims,
The Cybernetics Group
, 277.
♦
THIS WAS CHANGED FOR PUBLICATION
: Notes by Neil J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner in Claude Shannon,
Collected Papers
, 882.
♦
“OF COURSE, IS OF NO IMPORTANCE”
: Claude E. Shannon, “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” first presented at National IRE Convention, 9 March 1949, in Claude Shannon,
Collected Papers
, 637; and “A Chess-Playing Machine,”
Scientific American
(February 1950), in Claude Shannon,
Collected Papers
, 657.
♦
VISITED THE AMERICAN CHAMPION
: Edward Lasker to Claude Shannon, 7 February 1949, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
♦
“LEARNING CHESS PLAYER”
: Claude Shannon to C. J. S. Purdy, 28 August 1952, Manuscript Div., Library of Congress, by permission of Mary E. Shannon.
♦
SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF JUGGLING
: Unpublished, in Claude Shannon,
Collected Papers
, 861. The actual lines, from Cummings’s poem “voices to voices, lip to lip,” are: “who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch / invents an instrument to measure Spring with?”
♦
A MACHINE THAT WOULD REPAIR ITSELF
: Claude Shannon to Irene Angus, 8 August 1952, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
♦
“WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU SWITCH ON ONE OF THESE MECHANICAL COMPUTERS”
: Robert McCraken, “The Sinister Machines,”
Wyoming Tribune
, March 1954.
♦
“INFORMATION THEORY, PHOTOSYNTHESIS, AND RELIGION”
: Peter Elias, “Two Famous Papers,”
IRE Transactions on Information Theory
4, no. 3 (1958): 99.
♦
“WE HAVE HEARD OF ‘ENTROPIES’ ”
: E. Colin Cherry,
On Human Communication
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1957), 214.
♦
“THOUGHT INTERFERES WITH THE PROBABILITY OF EVENTS”
: David L. Watson, “Entropy and Organization,”
Science
72 (1930): 222.
♦
THE RUMOR AT BELL LABS
: Robert Price, “A Conversation with Claude Shannon: One Man’s Approach to Problem Solving,”
IEEE Communications Magazine
22 (1984): 124.
♦
“THE THEORETICAL STUDY OF THE STEAM ENGINE”
: For example, J. Johnstone, “Entropy and Evolution,”
Philosophy
7 (July 1932): 287.
♦
MAXWELL TURNED ABOUT-FACE
: James Clerk Maxwell,
Theory of Heat
, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1872), 186; 8th edition (London: Longmans, Green, 1891), 189 n.
♦
“YOU CAN’T WIN”
: Peter Nicholls and David Langford, eds.,
The Science in Science Fiction
(New York: Knopf, 1983), 86.
♦
“ALTHOUGH MECHANICAL ENERGY IS
INDESTRUCTIBLE
”
: Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), “Physical Considerations Regarding the Possible Age of the Sun’s Heat,” lecture at the Meeting of the British Association at Manchester, September 1861, in
Philosophical Magazine
152 (February 1862): 158.
♦
“IN CONSIDERING THE CONVERSION OF PSYCHICAL ENERGY”
: Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” 1918
b
, 116, in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
(London: Hogarth Press, 1955).
♦
“CONFUSION, LIKE THE CORRELATIVE TERM ORDER”
: James Clerk Maxwell, “Diffusion,” written for the ninth edition of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, in
The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell
, ed. W. D. Niven, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890; repr. New York: Dover, 1965), 646.
♦
“TIME FLOWS ON, NEVER COMES BACK”
: Léon Brillouin, “Life, Thermodynamics, and Cybernetics” (1949), in Harvey S. Leff and Andrew F. Rex, eds.,
Maxwell’s Demon 2: Entropy, Classical and Quantum Information, Computing
(Bristol, U.K.: Institute of Physics, 2003), 77.
♦
“THE ACCIDENTS OF LIFE”
: Richard Feynman,
The Character of Physical Law
(New York: Modern Library, 1994), 106.
♦
“
MORAL
.
THE 2ND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS”
: James Clerk Maxwell to John William Strutt, 6 December 1870, in Elizabeth Garber, Stephen G. Brush, and C. W. F. Everitt, eds.,
Maxwell on Heat and Statistical Mechanics: On “Avoiding All Personal Enquiries” of Molecules
(London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 205.
♦
“THE ODDS AGAINST A PIECE OF CHALK”
: Quoted by Andrew Hodges, “What Did Alan Turing Mean by ‘Machine,’?” in Philip Husbands et al.,
The Mechanical Mind in History
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 81.
♦
“AND YET NO WORK HAS BEEN DONE”
: James Clerk Maxwell to Peter Guthrie Tait, 11 December 1867, in
The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell
, ed. P. M. Harman, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 332.
♦
“HE DIFFERS FROM REAL LIVING ANIMALS”
: Royal Institution Lecture, 28 February 1879,
Proceedings of the Royal Institution
9 (1880): 113, in William Thomson,
Mathematical and Physical Papers
, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 21.
♦
“INFINITE SWARMS OF ABSURD LITTLE MICROSCOPIC IMPS”
: “Editor’s Table,”
Popular Science Monthly
15 (1879): 412.
♦
“CLERK MAXWELL’S DEMON”
: Henry Adams to Brooks Adams, 2 May 1903, in
Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters
, ed. Harold Cater (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 545.
♦
“INFINITELY SUBTILE SENSES”
: Henri Poincaré,
The Foundations of Science
, trans. George Bruce Halsted (New York: Science Press, 1913), 152.
♦
“NOW WE MUST NOT INTRODUCE DEMONOLOGY”
: James Johnstone,
The Philosophy of Biology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 118.
♦
“IF WE VIEW THE EXPERIMENTING MAN”
: Leó Szilárd, “On the Decrease of Entropy in a Thermodynamic System by the Intervention of Intelligent Beings,” trans. Anatol Rapoport and Mechthilde Knoller, from Leó Szilárd,
“Über Die Entropieverminderung in Einem Thermodynamischen System Bei Eingriffen Intelligenter Wesen
,”
Zeitschrift für Physik
53 (1929): 840–56, in Harvey S. Leff and Andrew F. Rex, eds.,
Maxwell’s Demon 2
, 111.
♦
“THINKING GENERATES ENTROPY”
: Quoted in William Lanouette,
Genius in the Shadows
(New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 64.
♦
“I THINK ACTUALLY SZILÁRD”
: Shannon interview with Friedrich-Wilhelm Hagemeyer, 1977, quoted in Erico Mariu Guizzo, “The Essential Message: Claude Shannon and the Making of Information Theory” (Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004).
♦
“I CONSIDER HOW MUCH INFORMATION IS
PRODUCED
”
: Claude Shannon to Norbert Wiener, 13 October 1948, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Archives.
