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Visit www. Follow us on :. Entertainment News. Times Now Digital. Updated Nov 08, IST. Yuvarajappa BC, a deputy chief engineer from Karnataka, managed to win Rs 12,50, at KBC 13, before quitting on the question for Rs 25 lakh as he was unsure about the answer.

KBC contestant Yuvarajappa B. Arouse or rouse? As or like? As , because or since? As , when or while? Been or gone? Begin or start? Beside or besides? Between or among? Born or borne? Bring , take and fetch Can , could or may? Classic or classical? Come or go? Consider or regard?

Consist , comprise or compose? Content or contents? Different from , different to or different than? Do or make? Down , downwards or downward? During or for? Each or every?

East or eastern ; north or northern? Economic or economical? Efficient or effective? Elder , eldest or older , oldest? End or finish? Especially or specially? Except or except for? Expect , hope or wait?

Experience or experiment? Fall or fall down? Far or a long way? Farther , farthest or further , furthest? Fast , quick or quickly? Fell or felt? Female or feminine ; male or masculine? Finally , at last , lastly or in the end? First , firstly or at first?

Fit or suit? Following or the following? For or since? Forget or leave? Full or filled? Fun or funny? Get or go? Grateful or thankful? Hear or listen to? High or tall? Historic or historical? House or home? How is …? If or when? If or whether? Ill or sick? A man has seen thousands of machines in his lifetime.

From what he sees of them he draws a number of general conclusions. They are ugly, each is designed for a very limited purpose, when required for a minutely different purpose they are useless, the variety of behaviour of any one of them is very small, etc. Naturally he concludes that these are necessary properties of machines in general.

Many of these limitations are associated with the very small storage capacity of most machines. I am assuming that the idea of storage capacity is extended in some way to cover machines other than discrete-state machines. The exact definition does not matter as no mathematical accuracy is claimed in the present discussion. A few years ago, when very little had been heard of digital computers, it was possible to elicit much incredulity concerning them, if one mentioned their properties without describing their construction.

That was presumably due to a similar application of the principle of scientific induction. These applications of the principle are of course largely unconscious. When a burnt child fears the fire and shows that he fears it by avoiding it, I should say that he was applying scientific induction. I could of course also describe his behaviour in many other ways. The works and customs of mankind do not seem to be very suitable material to which to apply scientific induction.

A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained. Otherwise we may as most English children do decide that everybody speaks English, and that it is silly to learn French. There are, however, special remarks to be made about many of the disabilities that have been mentioned. The inability to enjoy strawberries and cream may have struck the reader as frivolous.

Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt to make one do so would be idiotic. What is important about this disability is that it contributes to some of the other disabilities, e. I think this criticism can be explained in terms of the imitation game. It is claimed that the interrogator could distinguish the machine from the man simply by setting them a number of problems in arithmetic.

The machine would be unmasked because of its deadly accuracy. The reply to this is simple. The machine programmed for playing the game would not attempt to give the right answers to the arithmetic problems.

It would deliberately introduce mistakes in a manner calculated to confuse the interrogator. A mechanical fault would probably show itself through an unsuitable decision as to what sort of a mistake to make in the arithmetic. Even this interpretation of the criticism is not sufficiently sympathetic. But we cannot afford the space to go into it much further.

It seems to me that this criticism depends on a confusion between two kinds of mistake. Errors of functioning are due to some mechanical or electrical fault which causes the machine to behave otherwise than it was designed to do.

These abstract machines are mathematical fictions rather than physical objects. By definition they are incapable of errors of functioning. Errors of conclusion can only arise when some meaning is attached to the output signals from the machine. The machine might, for instance, type out mathematical equations, or sentences in English.

When a false proposition is typed we say that the machine has committed an error of conclusion. There is clearly no reason at all for saying that a machine cannot make this kind of mistake. To take a less perverse example, it might have some method for drawing conclusions by scientific induction. We must expect such a method to lead occasionally to erroneous results.

The claim that a machine cannot be the subject of its own thought can of course only be answered if it can be shown that the machine has some thought with some subject matter. In this sort of sense a machine undoubtedly can be its own subject matter. It may be used to help in making up its own programmes, or to predict the effect of alterations in its own structure.

By observing the results of its own behaviour it can modify its own programmes so as to achieve some purpose more effectively. These are possibilities of the near future, rather than Utopian dreams. The criticism that a machine cannot have much diversity of behaviour is just a way of saying that it cannot have much storage capacity. Until fairly recently a storage capacity of even a thousand digits was very rare.

The criticisms that we are considering here are often disguised forms of the argument from consciousness. Usually if one maintains that a machine can do one of these things, and describes the kind of method that the machine could use, one will not make much of an impression. It is thought that the method whatever it may be, for it must be mechanical is really rather base. Compare the parenthesis in Jefferson's statement quoted on p.

This statement is quoted by Hartree p. Whether this is possible in principle or not is a stimulating and exciting question, suggested by some of these recent developments.

I am in thorough agreement with Hartree over this. It will be noticed that be does not assert that the machines in question had not got the property, but rather that the evidence available to Lady Lovelace did not encourage her to believe that they had it. It is quite possible that the machines in question had in a sense got this property. For suppose that some discrete-state machine has the property. The Analytical Engine was a universal digital computer, so that, if its storage capacity and speed were adequate, it could by suitable programming be made to mimic the machine in question.

Probably this argument did not occur to the Countess or to Babbage. In any case there was no obligation on them to claim all that could be claimed. This whole question will be considered again under the heading of learning machines. This statement is a more direct challenge and can be met directly. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

This is largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do, or rather because, although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried, slipshod fashion, taking risks. Naturally I am often wrong, and the result is a surprise for me for by the time the experiment is done these assumptions have been forgotten.

These admissions lay me open to lectures on the subject of my vicious ways, but do not throw any doubt on my credibility when I testify to the surprises I experience. I do not expect this reply to silence my critic. He will probably say that such surprises are due to some creative mental act on my part, and reflect no credit on the machine.

This leads us back to the argument from consciousness, and far from the idea of surprise. The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject.

This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false. A natural consequence of doing so is that one then assumes that there is no virtue in the mere working out of consequences from data and general principles.

The nervous system is certainly not a discrete-state machine. A small error in the information about the size of a nervous impulse impinging on a neuron, may make a large difference to the size of the outgoing impulse.

It may be argued that, this being so, one cannot expect to be able to mimic the behaviour of the nervous system with a discrete-state system. It is true that a discrete-state machine must be different from a continuous machine.

But if we adhere to the conditions of the imitation game, the interrogator will not be able to take any advantage of this difference. The situation can be made clearer if we consider some other simpler continuous machine. A differential analyser will do very well. A differential analyser is a certain kind of machine not of the discrete-state type used for some kinds of calculation. Some of these provide their answers in a typed form, and so are suitable for taking part in the game.

It would not be possible for a digital computer to predict exactly what answers the differential analyser would give to a problem, but it would be quite capable of giving the right sort of answer. Under these circumstances it would be very difficult for the interrogator to distinguish the differential analyser from the digital computer.

It is not possible to produce a set of rules purporting to describe what a man should do in every conceivable set of circumstances. One might for instance have a rule that one is to stop when one sees a red traffic light, and to go if one sees a green one, but what if by some fault both appear together? One may perhaps decide that it is safest to stop. But some further difficulty may well arise from this decision later. To attempt to provide rules of conduct to cover every eventuality, even those arising from traffic lights, appears to be impossible.

With all this I agree. From this it is argued that we cannot be machines. I shall try to reproduce the argument, but I fear I shall hardly do it justice. It seems to run something like this. But there are no such rules, so men cannot be machines. I do not think the argument is ever put quite like this, bat I believe this is the argument used nevertheless. For we believe that it is not only true that being regulated by laws of behaviour implies being some sort of machine though not necessarily a discrete-state machine , but that conversely being such a machine implies being regulated by such laws.

However, we cannot so easily convince ourselves of the absence of complete laws of behaviour as of complete rules of conduct. There are no such laws. We can demonstrate more forcibly that any such statement would be unjustified. For suppose we could be sure of finding such laws if they existed. Then given a discrete-state machine it should certainly be possible to discover by observation sufficent about it to predict its future behaviour, and this within a reasonable time, say a thousand years.

But this does not seem to be the case. I have set up on the Manchester computer a small programme using only units of storage, whereby the machine supplied with one sixteen figure number replies with another within two seconds. I would defy anyone to learn from these replies sufficient about the programme to be able to predict any replies to untried values. I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz.

These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies.

The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go. This argument is to my mind quite a strong one.

One can say in reply that many scientific theories seem to remain workable in practice, in spite of clashing with E. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking is just the kind of phenomenon where E. A more specific argument based on E. The machine can only guess at random, and perhaps gets right, so the interrogator makes the right identification.

Suppose the digital computer contains a random number generator. Then it will be natural to use this to decide what answer to give. But then the random number generator will be subject to the psycho-kinetic powers of the interrogator. Perhaps this psycho-kinesis might cause the machine to guess right more often than would be expected on a probability calculation, so that the interrogator might still be unable to make the right identification.

On the other hand, he might be able to guess right without any questioning, by clairvoyance. With E. If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up. The situation could be regarded as analogous to that which would occur if the interrogator were talking to himself and one of the competitors was listening with his ear to the wall.

The reader will have anticipated that I have no very convincing arguments of a positive nature to support my views. If I had I should not have taken such pains to point out the fallacies in contrary views. Such evidence as I have I shall now give. Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace's objection, which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do.

Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away.

If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed. Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines?

There does seem to be one for the human mind. Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 1 month ago. Active 3 years ago. Viewed k times. So, what's the exact difference and when should you use one or the other? Improve this question. Korneel Bouman Korneel Bouman 1, 2 2 gold badges 10 10 silver badges 7 7 bronze badges. Related: When is it appropriate to use 'that' as opposed to 'which'? There's also a very illustration on pearsonlongman.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Either is fine, but "which" is better. Improve this answer.