Beschreibung:

SHANNON, Claude E. and John MCCARTHY eds. Automata studies . Princeton: Princeton U. P, 1956. 4 o. Text diagrams. Original orange printed wrappers. Provenance : Edmund C. Berkeley, with his signature on the title. FIRST EDITION. "The papers have been divided into three groups. The first group consists of papers dealing with automata having a finite number of possible internal states [i.e, the brain and all actual physical machines] ... The second group of papers deals with the theory of Turing machines and related questions, that is to say, with automata having an unlimited number of possible states ... The third section of the book contains papers relating more directly to the synthesis of automata which will simulate in some sense the operation of a living organism" (pp. vi-viii). Included are papers by John von Neumann ("Probabilistic logics and the synthesis of reliable organisms from unreliable parts"), Marvin Minsky ("Some universal elements for finite automata"), John McCarthy ("The inversion of functions defined by Turing machines"), and Claude E. Shannon ("A universal Turing machine with two internal states" and "Computability by probabilistic machines," with K. de Leeuw, E. F. Moore, and N. Shapiro). McCarthy had planned a book on artificial intelligence, but Shannon, who did most of the work on the volume, preferred a more traditional title. A result of the title change was that as one would expect, the papers received concerned automata rather than artificial intelligence. OOC 893.