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xxxviii, [1]-393, [1 (blank)] pages. 4to. 10 3/4 x 8 inches. Publisher's blue cloth lacking the dust jacket as usual. "NAT ROCHESTER 11-30-51" inked on the front pastedown. Small red check mark on the lower right of front flyleaf, otherwise bright and clean internally. Cloth. "The second of two symposia on large-scale computers organized by Howard Aiken, the head of Harvard's Computation Laboratory. This symposium was primarily devoted to the application of computing machinery in a wide range of fields, including economics, physics, aeronautics, and physiology. The Mark III, Aiken's first electronic computer, was unveiled during the first session. In his introductory remarks, Aiken announced that the Computation Laboratory would undertake no further large-scale computing machines 'with the exception of one [the Mark IV], which we hope to build for our own use and keep at Harvard'" OOC, #417 Just like the first symposia, this second symposia was wildly oversubscribed. Expecting 300 attendees, the actual number was closer to 700 which "clearly indicated the rapidity with which the field of automatic computation is growing." Papers were presented by many well known scientists working in computing: J. Presper Eckert, Jr., Jay Forrester, George R. Stibitz, Wassily W. Leontief, Louis N. Ridenour and others. Previous owner "Nathaniel Rochester (January 14, 1919 June 8, 2001) was the chief architect of the IBM 701, the first mass-produced scientific computer, and of the prototype of its first commercial version, the IBM 702. He wrote the first assembler and participated in the founding of the field of artificial intelligence. Rochester received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1941. He stayed on at MIT in the Radiation Laboratory for three years and then moved to Sylvania Electric Products where he was responsible for the design and construction of radar sets and other military equipment. His group built the arithmetic element for the Whirlwind I computer at MIT. In 1948, Rochester moved to IBM, where he co-designed, along with Jerrier Haddad, the first mass-produced scientific computer, the IBM 701. He wrote the first symbolic assembler, which allowed programs to be written in short, readable commands rather than pure numbers or punch codes. He became the chief architect of IBM's 700 series of computers. In 1955, IBM organized a group to study pattern recognition, information theory and switching circuit theory, headed by Rochester.[1] Among other projects, the group simulated the behaviour of abstract neural networks on an IBM 704 computer. That summer John McCarthy, a young Dartmouth College mathematician, was also working at IBM. He and Marvin Minsky had begun to talk seriously about the idea of intelligent machines. They approached Rochester and Claude Shannon with a proposal for a conference on the subject. With the support of the two senior scientists, they secured $7,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a conference in the summer of 1956. The meeting, now known as the Dartmouth Conference, is widely considered the "birth of artificial intelligence." Rochester continued to supervise artificial intelligence projects at IBM, including Arthur Samuel's checkers program, Herbert Gelernter's Geometry Theorem Prover and Alex Bernstein's chess program. In 1958, he was a visiting professor at MIT, where he helped McCarthy with the development of the Lisp programming language. The artificial intelligence programs developed at IBM began to generate a great deal of publicity and were featured in articles in both Scientific American and The New York Times. IBM shareholders began to pressure Thomas J. Watson Jr., the president of IBM, to explain why research dollars were being used for such "frivolous matters." In addition, IBM's marketing people had begun to notice that customers were frightened of the idea of "electronic brains" and "thinking machines". An internal report.
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