Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine Read Free Page B

do-re-mi?”
    â€œThat’s a very interesting idea,” said the Professor. “Perhaps we’ll try it when I get home. Meantime—uh—you can be rehearsing.”
    â€œProfessor,” Irene said shyly, “could we—could we ask it a question? Just to see how it works?”
    Professor Bullfinch stroked his chin. “I don’t see why not. Of course, Danny knows its general operation—he has seen me working on it for more than a year.”
    â€œGo ahead, Irene,” Danny said. “You try. Ask it one of our homework problems.”
    The Professor snapped a couple of switches. From the cabinet, a steady soft humming came. Several colored lights went on.
    â€œTalk into the microphone, Irene,” he said. “Speak slowly and clearly so that Miniac can understand you and translate your words into electrical impulses.”
    â€œI understand.” Irene stepped close to the desk—or console, as it was called. “It seems strange to ask questions of a machine, doesn’t it?” With a slightly nervous quaver in her voice, she said into the microphone, “Um…John buys 20 yards of silk for thirty dollars. How much would 918 yards of silk cost him?”
    The Professor pressed one of the flat keys. There was a brief pause. Several tiny lights blinked, then a green light flashed on, and the typewriter began to click as if a ghostly hand were striking the keys.
    â€œ$1,377.00,” it wrote. And after a second or two, it added, “And worth it.”
    Joe blinked. “Hey! How does the machine know that?”
    â€œWell,” said Professor Bullfinch, “the computer has several different sections. There’s the communications console, this desk through which the operator can talk to the machine and the machine can answer. Then there’s an arithmetic unit that can work out sums, and a unit that can do comparisons and logical problems. And there’s a memory unit in which all its information is stored. It has hundreds of tables and facts in its memory banks. Each fact is stored as an electrical pattern on magnetic tape, so altogether they take up very little room. The machine can look into its memory and tell you whether the price is right.”
    Irene breathed a long sigh. “It’s—it’s fantastic, like science fiction,” she said. “A machine that can work all sorts of problems, give you answers to anything you want to know! It’s kind of Superman!”
    The Professor shook his head. “No, my dear,” he said. “It is only a kind of supertool. Everything in this machine is inside the human head, in the much smaller space of the human brain. Just think of it—all the hundreds of thousands of switches, core memory planes, miles of wire, tubes—all that’s in that big case and in this console—are all huge and awkward compared to the delicate, tiny cells of the human brain which is capable of doing as much as, or more than, the best of these machines. It’s the human brain which can produce a mechanical brain like this one.
    â€œThe computer can reason,” he went on. “It can do sums and give information and draw logical conclusions, but it can’t create anything. It could give you all the words that rhyme with moon, for instance, but it couldn’t put them together into a poem.”
    â€œHa! I feel better,” Joe said. “People still have something the machine hasn’t got.”
    â€œThat’s right. It’s a wonderful, complex tool, but it has no mind. It doesn’t know it exists.”
    Danny had been bending over the console, peering at it. Now he said, “Look, Professor! The red light is on. That means something’s wrong, doesn’t it? I’ll turn off the power—”
    He reached for the switch marked POWER OFF. Before he could touch it, the Professor caught his hand. “Danny,” he said, “there you go