Get Smart

When I was a small boy, there was a machine in the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia, that played tic-tac-toe and never lost. No matter where you placed your X, it rebounded with the right O. It could always win or force a draw, even if you went first and took the center square. The machine looked smart to an eight-year-old, but my mother, a logician, linguist, and early Fortran speaker, explained to me on one of our frequent visits that smart was the last thing it was. It could do one thing--play one essentially dumb game--and it could do it only because it had been programmed to follow a mechanical network of on/off switches. It wasn't thinking; it was just tracking.