Computer Engineering

How can we build an efficient computer?

For artificial intelligence to succeed, we need two things: intelligence and an artifact. The computer has been the artifact of choice. The modern digital electronic computer was invented independently and almost simultaneously by scientists in three countries embattled in World War II. The first operational  computer was the electro-mechanical Heath Robinson,"built in 1940 by Alan Turing's team for a single purpose: deciphering German messages.
In 1943, the same group developed the Colossus, a powerful general - purpose machine based on vacuum tubes. The first operational  programmable  computer was the 2-3, the invention of Konrad Zuse in Germany in 1941. Zuse also invented floating - point numbers and the first high - level programming language, Plankalkiil. The first  electronic  computer, the ABC, was assembled by John Atanasoff and his student Clifford Berry between 1940 and 1942 at Iowa State University. Atanasoff's research received little support or recognition; it was the ENIAC, developed as part of a secret military project at the University of Pennsylvania by a team including John Mauchly and John Eckert, that proved to be the most influential forerunner of modern computers.

In the half - century since then, each generation of computer hardware has brought an increase in speed and capacity and a decrease in price. Performance doubles every 18 months or so, with a decade or two to go at this rate of increase. After that, we will need molecular engineering or some other new technology.

Of course, there were calculating devices before the electronic computer. The earliest automated machines, dating from the 17th century.  The first  programmable  machine was a loom devised in 1805 by Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752 - 1834) that

used punched cards to store instructions for the pattern to be woven. In the mid - 19th century, Charles Babbage (1792 - 1871) designed two machines, neither of which he completed. The " Difference Engine, "  which appears on the cover of this book, was intended to compute mathematical tables for engineering and scientific projects. It was finally built and shown to work

in 1991 at the Science Museum in London (Swade, 1993).

Babbage's  " Analytical Engine " was far more ambitious: it included addressable memory, stored programs, and conditional jumps and was the first artifact capable of universal computation. Babbage's colleague Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, was perhaps the world's first programmer. (The programming language Ada is named after her.) She wrote programs for the unfinished Analytical Engine and even speculated that the machine could play chess or compose music.

AI  also owes a debt to the software side of computer science, which has supplied the operating systems, programming languages, and tools needed to write modern programs (and papers about them). But this is one area where the debt has been repaid: work in  A.I  has pioneered many ideas that have made their way back to mainstream computer science, including time sharing, interactive interpreters, personal computers with windows and mice, rapid development environments, the linked list data type, automatic storage management, and key concepts of symbolic, functional, dynamic, and object - oriented programming.