Return of the Human Computers  

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Jenis: Article from Bulletin/Magazine
Dalam koleksi: The Economist (http://search.proquest.com/) vol. 401 no. 8762 (Dec. 2011), page 5-6.
Topik: Trends; Mathematicians; Computers
Fulltext: The ratings game.pdf (19.81KB)

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Perpustakaan Pusat (Semanggi) Nomor Panggil: EE29.69 Non-tandon: 1 (dapat dipinjam: 0) Tandon: tidak ada

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It was late summer 1937, and the recovery from the Depression had stalled. American government officials had stimulus money to spend but, with winter looming, there were few construction projects to fund. So the officials created office posts instead. One project was assigned to a floor of a dusty old New York industrial building, not far from Times Square. It would eventually house 300 computers--humans, not machines. The computers crunched through the calculations necessary to create mathematical tables, then an indispensable reference tool for many scientists. The mathematicians in charge of the project worked out how to break each calculation down into simple operations, the outcomes of which could be combined to give a final result. It was a technique that had been employed for decades across America and Europe. The field of human computing even had its own journal and trade-union representation. Computing offices calculated ballistics trajectories, processed census statistics and charted the course of comets. They would continue to do so until the 1960s, when electronic computers became cheap enough to consign the profession to history. Until recently, that is. Over the past few years, human computing has been reborn. The new generation of human computers carry out different tasks, but they mirror their predecessors in many other ways.

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