MACHINE WITH A MEMORY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 71, 10 January 1947, Page 5

MACHINE WITH A MEMORY

WORK OF BRITISH EXPERTS TWO YEARS TO BUILD Four leading British scientists are working on Britain’s £125,000 “electronic brain,” to be known as the “Automatic Computing Engine,” for which the parts are now being made. Looking like a giant radio set Bft square, writes a London Evening News reporter, this great valve calculator will work out at incredible speed the most abstruse problems. The scientists, I learn, are Sir Charles Darwin, the brilliant physicist and director of the National Physical Laboratory at Molesey, Dr. A. M. Turing, Mr J. R. Womersley, head of the laboratory’s mathematical department, and Professor D. Hartree, of Cambridge University.

The Brain will be built at Molesey and will take two years. It will incorporate, I am told, an automatic telephone exchange of valves which at high speeds “orders” a prearranged series of jobs to be done by the machine. The human operator plans in a long series of instructions what he wants the machine to do, according to taper or cards punched with holes.

Mathematical tables for the machine to “refer” to will be stored in the library. Its own memory will go to 1200 places of decimals, but all it will use in calculating will be the figures 0 and 1 arranged in a special code. It will be able to multiply two ten-figure numbers in a five-hun-dredth of a second. Its designers say it will do equations with even a hundred “unknowns.”