Humans against computers

For more than a hundred years, writers have been interested in the power of machines – and what happens when they go wrong. Before computers became part of modern life, they began to appear in stories. Often, these computers begin working for humans, but later they refuse to do this and start to do frightening and dangerous things.

A good example of this kind of story is I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, by Harlan Ellison, published in 1967. Three very large and powerful countries use computers to fight against one another, but the computers become angry with the humans. They work together to kill all the humans in the world except for five people, who the computers keep like animals. Later, films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and I, Robot used stories of this kind too.

The idea of computers that are more powerful than humans is interesting to scientists too. That is why IBM spent a lot of time and money building s chess computer called Deep Blue. They wanted to show that a computer could win against Gary Kasparov, the best chess player in the world.

In 1996, Deep Blue played Kasparov six times. Kasparov won the match, but IBM knew that their computer could do better. They did a lot of work on the computer and its software, and in 1997, Deep Blue and Kasparov played again. This time, Deep Blue won the match (3.5 to 2.5).

A lot of newspapers wrote about Deep Blue and Kasparov. They said that it was the beginning of a new age: computers had finally become more intelligent than humans. However, Deep Blue had help from humans. Its software was written by five different computer technicians and a very good chess player. Also, it is important to remember that chess is a mathematical game. Computers are good at chess because they can do millions of calculations every second. Deep Blue can look at 200,000,000 different chess moves every second; a human chess player like Kasparov can look at three! In some ways, it is surprising that computers do not win at chess every time. In 2003, Kasparov played against a new computer, Deep Junior, and the match ended 3-3.

Computers can follow instructions and play mathematical games very well, but are they really intelligent? Do they really think in the same way that humans think? These are difficult questions, and scientists do not always agree on the answers. Some scientists believe that the human brain is just like a very powerful computer; so if we can make a computer that is powerful enough, it will think like a human brain. Other scientists believe that the human brain does not do calculations in the same way as a computer. They think that perhaps one day a really powerful computer will do some of the things that a human brain does, but it will never really think like one.

In the past, people thought that computers did not have any imagination - they could never invent funny stories, or write beautiful music. However, software programmers have recently ‘taught’ computers to do many different things which need imagination. For example, Paul Hodgson is a programmer and his favourite music is jazz. He wrote some music software for his computer, and now the computer can invent pieces of music in the same way as a jazz musician. The computer is not a very good jazz musician – but as the software gets better, so will the music.

In fact, music, like chess, is quite mathematical. Perhaps it is not a surprise that computers are good at both. One of the first computers technicians, Alan Turing, was interested in the question ‘Can a computer really think like a human?’, so he invented the Turing Test. To do the test, you sit at a computer and ‘talk’ (using messages) to someone in a different room. That ‘someone’ can be a person or a computer, but you do not know which it is. If you think it is a person but it is really a computer, then that computer has passed the Turing Test.

Every year programmers try to write software which makes their computer pass the Turing Test. There is a prize of 100,000 dollars – the Loebner Prize – for the first computer to pass the test. Alan Turing himself made this prediction: ‘A computer will pass the Turing Test before the end of the twentieth century. But he was wrong, and so far, nobody has won the prize.

The Internet

The Internet began in the 1970s as a way to send information from one computer to another. It was only used by people who worked in governments and universities. But in the 1990s, it suddenly began to be more popular.

In the early 1990s, a British man called Tim Berners-Lee invented the ‘Web’. With the Web it was much easier to find information on the Internet, and to move from part of the Internet to another. In the first half of the 1990s, it was clear that the Internet and the Web were changing the world for ever. Hundreds of new companies started on the Internet. They knew that the Internet was growing, and that it offered an easy way to do business with millions of people. The banks were very happy to give money to these new ‘Internet start-up’ companies because they seemed to be the future. However, by the end of the 1990s there were too many of these companies. They could not all be successful, and many of them went out of business. Now, only the best of the Internet start-up companies are making money.

Although most Internet start-up companies are not successful, a few of them have become some of the biggest companies in the world. In 1996, two students at Stanford University, California, invented a new and better kind of search engine – a program that helps people to find information on the Web. Their names were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and they called their search engine ‘Google’. They started a new company in 1997, with an office in a friend’s garage! The company grew very quickly and today has nearly 6,000 people working for it. The Google search engine does about 1 billion searches every day for users around the world, and the 450,000 computers at the company’s offices remember them all! Larry Page and Sergey Brin are now two of the richest people in the world.

Pierre Omidyar is another Internet billionaire. Omydiar worked for a software company as a computer programmer, and in 1995, he started a website where people could buy and sell almost anything. He called it ‘Auction Web’ but soon changed the name to ‘eBay’. At first,, the website was something that Omidyar did in his own time, but the number of people who used it grew quickly and eBay became a successful company. Today, more than 180 million people use the website, and almost everything you can think of has been sold, from some water in a cup used by Elvis Presley (for 455 dollars) to a town (Bridgeville, California, for nearly 2 million dollars).

Young people often know more about computing and the Internet then older people. For this reason, some very young people have had a lot of success with Internet start.-up companies. Tom Hadfield began using computers at the age of two. When he was twelve, he began putting football scores on the Internet, just because he liked football. This soon became a business called Soccernet. During the 1998 World Cup, 300,000 people visited the Soccernet website every day. In 1999, Tom and his father sold 60 per cent of Soccernet to Disney for 15 million pounds. Tom and his father also started another Internet company called Schoolsnet, which has information for students and teachers. Thanks to the Internet Tom Hadfield became a very successful businessman before he left school!

One good idea can be enough to make a lot of money on the Internet. In 2005, Alex Tew, a British teenager, needed money to study at University. He sat down in his bedroom with a piece of paper and a pen and wrote, ‘How can I become a millionaire?’ Twenty minutes later, he thought of the ‘Million Dollar Homepage’. The idea was to let companies advertise on his website for one dollar a pixel. (Pixels are the tiny dots that make the pictures you see on your computer.) soon news of his website was on television and in the newspapers, and a lot of companies bought pixels on his website. When he had sold 999,000 for 999,000 dollars, he decided to sell the final 1,000 pixels on eBay. Instead of 1,000 dollars, he got more than 38,000 dollars for them!

Canadian Kyle MacDonald had a more unusual idea. He wanted a house but did not have enough money to buy one. So he decided to trade things on the Internet. He started with a red paperclip and traded it for a pen. Then he traded it for something else. He continued trading and, exactly a year later, he got a house!

Today, almost every company in the world has got a website on the Internet. Each website has got a web address – its own special name which you use to visit the site. In the early 1990s, before most companies had really thought about the Internet, some people got web addresses with the names of famous companies – for example, Panasonic and Hertz. These people were not part of the companies; they were hoping to sell the web addresses to the companies for a lot of money one day in the future. That was called ‘cyber-squatting’. Since 1999, new international laws have made cyber-squatting impossible.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 679