На этой странице помещены тексты по английскому языку про то, что "Компьютер ещё не может думать" и про "Педафлопные вычисления", которые нужно письменно превести на русский группам A и B1, занимающимся у Цапаевой Ю.А.

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   Can Computers Think? Not Yet!
   I remember about 10 years ago there was a lot of talk about artificial intelligence, writing a program that would learn. Particularly in Japan there was a lot of enthusiasm. Now that 10 years that have gone by, I hear less and less about it. I'm sure there's progress. There are some signs that machines are doing things kind of close to thinking, but I don't think we can say that we have a machine that learns today.
   I suspect many of you followed, as I did, the recent chess match between Garry Kasparov and the IBM machine. I found that quire interesting on several counts First of all, machines have got better and better at playing chess, and they are beginning to approach the capabilities of good expert humans. And this machine, the IBM machine, was especially designed to do the absolute best that we thought could be done with the computer.
   And so we had this chess match between the IBM machine and a world chess champion. It was for six games. They followed the rules of human chess competition. The chess clock was turned off and on for the computer, and the first game the computer won. And Kasparov was very impressed. So he sat up that evening studying how did he lose that match, what was the strategy of the computer. And what was the computer doing that night? Well, it was turned off in the comer.
   So you know what happened. The computer didn't win another game! Garry Kasparov won three and tied two. So computers don't think yet. At least not chess computers.

   Pedaflop Computing
   Not long ago I attended a workshop, and it was called enabling technologies for pedaflop computing. Now, some of you may not know what a pedaflop is, so let me explain that, assuming that some of you don't. Along about 1960, I remember, because I was involved, we invented the player piano sequence and made the floating point in our computer, versus bringing a subroutine to do it. And from that time on we could say how many flops does your machine do, Floating Point Operations, flops? How many flops does your computer do? And so today when we look at personal computers we say how many megaflops do they do? How manv million floating point operations per second?
   People that can afford big workstations can say how many gigaflops does your computer do? That's 1000 megaflops. Well, that's enough for most people. But, you know, there's always a government laboratory that wants something bigger. And so we have one today.
   It's the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, and they wanted a teraflop machine. And so they ordered one from Intel and it's being delivered sort of piecemeal now, and by the middle of next year it's supposed to be all done, and it's supposed to run at a teraflop. And it has 9900 processors. It is a real monster. And, of course, all the other national laboratories are very jealous and they say, well, it costs too much, $40-some million, it won't work anyway, who needs one? But I think it's kind of nice that we have a teraflop machine because I guess we needed one. I'm not quite sure. Anyway, that's a teraflop.
   Now, I think, you know what a pedaflop is. A pedaflop is 1000 teraflops, and we're nowhere near to getting a pedaflop machine. But agencies like to talk about it. So they were the sponsors of this workshop.
   I was the keynote speaker at this first pedaflnp conference. Now, they are annual. You know, once you get started you can do it every year. And so I talked about revolution. I talked about where we might go in the future to build a pedaflop machine. And talked about things like can't we use biology? And everyone smiled and said nice things, but as I listened to the other talks, everyone talked evolution. And what the group thought, and this is a group of probably 30 technical people. They were all supposed to be top-notch in their various areas, they said if we just keep doing what we're doing, in 20 years we'll have pedaflop. And they had a documentation to prove it. They had a straight line on semilog paper.