Is It Possible for Machines to Think: A Multi-Disciplinary Analysis - Dissertation Example

The man now depends on the machine, the most common manifestation of which is the ever-present computer, to accomplish many tasks ranging from the ordinary to the most complicated; and the machine depends on man to continuously develop to higher levels of sophistication in order to perform even more complicated tasks for man. As this relationship of cyclic dependency between man and the machine continues at full strength, the machine achieves a level of sophistication at which it is not only able to mechanically outmatch man in terms of physical performance – it was designed to do so – but it is also increasingly able to outmatch man in many mental capabilities.

It is when grandmasters of chess are beaten by Deep Blue (Reddy, 1996, pp. 88), it is when the machine starts participating in human conversations, that man starts to cast sidelong glances at it and begins to wonder whether the machine is doing something which has always been considered the exclusive preserve of human being: Can the machine think?The question under consideration has however been floating around in one form or the other. It is as old, if not older, than the computer. As early as January 15, 1941, the Des Moines Tribune carried an article on the development of the first prototype of the ABC computer at the Iowa State University by Professor John V Atanasoff and his graduate student Clifford Berry with the headline ‘Machine Remembers’.

"The giant computing machine under construction at Iowa State College has a memory consisting of 45 vacuum tubes…", the article reported, and went on to define it as: "An electrical computing machine said here to operate more like the human brain than any other such machine is known to exist is being built." (Martin, 1991, pp. 124)British Mathematician Alan M Turing was the one who first figured out how to build a programmable computing device – the universal Turing Device. All programmable computers today, in essence, use the Turin principle.