"Well, Knipe, you look a hundred per cent better. On the fifteenth day of continuous work, he collected the papers which he carried - almost at a run - to the offices of John Bohlen Inc., electrical engineers.
He was working in a mood of exultation, moving around the room amidst this littering of paper, rubbing his hands together. The living-room became filled with sheets of paper: formulae and calculations lists of words, thousands and thousands of words the plots of stories huge extracts from dictionaries, pages filled with the first names of men and women hundreds of surnames taken from the telephone directory. He went to work immediately, and there followed during the next few days a period of intense labour. Then feed it with plots and leave it to write the sentences. Therefore, it stands to reason that an engine built along the lines of the electric computer could be adjusted to arrange words (instead of numbers) in their right order according to the rules of grammar. Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: That English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness! Given the words, and given the sense of what is to be said, then there is only one correct order in which those words can be arranged. It could store away at least a thousand numbers at a time, extracting any one of them at the precise moment it was needed. On the other hand, it can have a memory, can it not? Their own electronic calculator had a marvellous memory.
"Of course," he said, speaking aloud, "it's completely ridiculous."Ī machine cannot have a brain. It was headed "A Narrow Escape", and it began "The night was dark and stormy, the wind whistled in the trees, the rain poured down like cats and dogs."Īt exactly that moment, his eyes and mouth began slowly to open, in a sort of wonder, and slowly he raised his head and became still, absolutely motionless, staring at the wall opposite with this look that was more perhaps of astonishment than of wonder. He leaned forward and began to read through the half-finished sheet of typing still in the machine. He threw his coat on the sofa, poured himself a drink of whisky, and sat down in front of the typewriter that was on the table. Then come back, and we'll have another talk about the future."Īdolph Knipe went home by bus to his two-room apartment. Why couldn't he stand up straight? Always drooping and untidy, with spots on his jacket, and hair falling all over his face. The older man waited, watching this tall, thin person who stood before him. How would you like to take a week's holiday? Do you good.
In fact, I might go so far as to say that without you and some of your ideas, this project might still be on the drawing-boards today. "I don't think I have to remind you that your own contribution, especially to the original plans, was an important one. "Aren't you proud, Knipe? Aren't you pleased?" Bohlen glanced at the long, melancholy face of the younger man. For practical purposes there is no limit to what it can do." John Bohlen, head of the firm of electrical engineers mainly responsible for its construction, "may be grasped by the fact that it can provide the correct answer in five seconds to a problem that would occupy a mathematician for a month. The speed with which the new engine works," said Mr. It is probably the fastest electronic calculating machine in the world today. The man took a newspaper and began to read: "The building of the great automatic computing engine, ordered by the government some time ago, is now complete. Did you see what the papers said this morning?" Now that it's all finished, I just called you in to tell you I think you've done a fine job. "The Great Automatic Grammatizator" by Roald Dahl