TOWARD THE DEVELOPMENT OFA MACHINE WHICH COMPREHENDS Robert K. Lindsay

Psychological theory attempts to explain how thinking--the subject matter of psychology--is possible by a brain composed of single mechanistic elements--the basic assumption of psychology. The problem of programming digital computers to behave in complex fashions is equivalent to this aspect of the psychological problem. Today automata theorists agree that no fundamental barrier blocks the development of machines which can think, by any reasonable definition of the term. However, the precise techniques for implementing general thinking proceGseE-J have been only partially developed. An example of a high-level, general thinking process is comprehension: the understanding of passages of a natural language.