The Machine at Play
The computer’s game-playing ability in chess and other games has been described. It is getting into the act in other fields, spectator sports as well. Baseball calls on the computer to plan season strategy and predict winners. When Roger Maris began his home-run string, an IBM 1401 predicted that he had 55 chances in 100 of beating Ruth’s record. Workers at M.I.T. have developed a computer program that answers questions like “Did the Red Sox ever win six games in a row?” and “Did every American League team play at least once in each park in every month?”
An IBM RAMAC computer is handling the management of New York’s Aqueduct race track, and promises to do a better job than the human bosses, thus saving money for the owners and the State of New York Tax Commission. The Fifteenth Annual Powderpuff Derby, the all-women transcontinental air race, was scored by a Royal Precision LGP-30 computer, and sports car enthusiasts have built their own “rally” computers to gauge their progress. The Winter Olympics at Innsbruck, Austria, will be scored by IBM’s RAMAC, and even bowling gets an assist from the computer in the form of a scoring device added to the automatic pin-setter, bad news to scorekeepers who fudge to boost their points.
An IBM 704 has proved a handy tool for blackjack players with a system for winning 99 per cent of the time, and rumor has it that a Los Angeles manufacturer plans to market a computer weighing only two pounds and costing $5, for horse-players.
Showing that the computer can be programmed with tact is the demonstrator that answers a man’s age correctly if he answers ten questions but announces only that a woman is over twenty-one. Proof that the computer has invaded just about every occupation there is comes to light in the news that a Frankfurt travel agency uses a computer called Zuse L23 as an agent. The traveler simply fills out a six-question form, and in a few seconds Zuse picks the ideal vacation from a choice of 500. Computers, it seems, are already telling us where to go.