Technology: The Brainy Breed

Computers may some day hold conventions of their own, delivering learned papers on people and running up expense accounts. Last week, however, man still had the upper hand as the Association for Computing Machinery held its 18th annual conference in Denver. William C. Norris, president of the highly successful Control Data Corp., told the convention that “only the world’s needs for energy rival the world’s needs for computation and data processing.” Though U.S. industry has already turned out 15,500 computers worth $5 billion, Norris’ enthusiasm was not farfetched. The computer is becoming so versatile that businessmen and scientists are almost daily discovering new and unexpected uses for it.

At Boston’s H. P. Hood & Sons, a computer figures out the right mix of fruit that goes into the company’s tutti-frutti ice cream, instructs the ice cream-making machinery just what grade and quantity of ice cream to make. In the kitchens of Sara Lee bakeries, another one stores recipes and orders the proper amount of butter and eggs; soon, it will also control the cake mixes, ensure that they are baked at the right temperature, then automatically test their quality, setting up electronic protests if it has been disobeyed. A General Electric computer is scheduling the timing of each stage in the construction of a 34-story Manhattan apartment house, and in Detroit computers tell automen how to make their cars ride more smoothly by calculating the strain requirements of springs and shock absorbers.

Watching the Grads. The cattle industry uses an electronic brain to get in 40 seconds a three-generation ancestry of any one of the 3,700,000 registered Aberdeen Angus beef cattle; an IBM machine tells many farmers, on learning the size and location of their farms, what crops to plant, what fertilizers to use and how many laborers to hire. Computers help to design comfortable brassieres for the garment industry, and have so highly automated many warehouses down to the billing and shipping that Rose Marie Reid swimsuits has cut by 75% the time it takes to ship a suit after getting an order.

They are now widely used to check on the consumer’s buying habits (the average supermarket shopper spends $13.10 on 22 items each time she enters the store), are pressed into service by oil companies to locate likely areas to drill, and can tell the Navy weather conditions surrounding almost any ship on the ocean. Stanford is using a Burroughs model to try to establish a scientific basis for foreign policy by measuring international tensions and the reactions of world leaders to current events. Georgia Tech assigns football seats for old grads strictly on a computer’s reading of how active they have been as alumni.

Telephone Chats. It is hardly a surprise that computers have begun talking over the telephone. The Communitype, made by Manhattan’s Radio Electronics Corp., enables a computer to receive a problem over phone lines and in seconds return an answer that can be read on an electric typewriter. Other systems now take phone requests for customer credit and answer with such prerecorded phrases as “Credit no good.” Perhaps the most startling development is that computers have learned how to create others of their kind, and are speeding up their own birth rate by designing even more sophisticated brains, then guiding automatic machines to put them together. To those out of step with the cybernetics revolution, it may come as a relief to discover that computers can be fallible: one at M.I.T. gasped and gave up the ghost after trying to digest all the weather information for the past million years, and another collapsed while trying to remember all the known scientific articles ever written.