Computers and People, Vol. 25 No. 4 (April 1976) — cover 'Hello Sunflowers!' by Mutsuko Sasaki; Weizenbaum, 'Computer Power and Human Reason'

Notes

Berkeley Enterprises, Newtonville MA, April 1976. 28 pp., OCR'd scan from bitsavers.org (Computers_And_Automation/Computers_and_People_V25_N04_197604.pdf) by way of its Internet Archive mirror, the source link. The cover is Hello Sunflowers! by Mutsuko Sasaki, Tokyo: three plotter-drawn sunflowers and two butterflies over a field of patterned leaves, signed Mutsuko. It is her first appearance in the magazine, four months before Nemophila in the Fourteenth Annual Computer Art Exposition issue (August 1976, also here). The cover note, which refers to her as "he", quotes her: "A program is constructed which eliminates invisible area and paints surfaces in the assigned ways. Basic data are four petals, three flower cores, three leaves, a stem, and a butterfly divided into the parts. This figure is drawn by using the program and by combining the data in a desired way. The calculation was made on a FACOM 270-30 computer." The same hidden-line-and-pattern-fill program became ART-3; a second version, Hellow Sunflowers!, II, is Fig. 5 of the Sasakis' Computers and Beauty (Creative Computing, November–December 1976, also here). The lead article reprints, by permission, the preface and complete introduction of Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (W. H. Freeman, 1976), with the book's table of contents, under Berkeley's editorial of quotations from it ("We can count, but we are rapidly forgetting how to say what is worth counting and why"): the ELIZA episode, Polanyi's 1935 confrontation with Bukharin, and the claim that there are acts of thought that ought to be attempted only by humans. Also: Eugene D. Story on management information systems for shipping companies; D. L. Waltz on PLANES, natural-language access to a large database; Andrew H. Neilly Jr. of Wiley on publishing and technology; a newsletter (computers in archaeology, a laboratory-animal data bank, teaching sign language, a cost model for the Privacy Act of 1974); and Neil Macdonald's puzzles.