The Super Memory Machine
By STANLEY HEWITT
Within the next two or three years Britain is to have
A
Yumory machine," possessing Rmmature
both a greater storage capacity and higher working speed than anything hitherto achieved by such a device. This is the Au- tomatic Computing Engine, planned by the Mathematica Division of the National Physi- cal Laboratory of Britain's De- partment of Scientific and In- dustrial Research.
As long ago as 1936 Dr A. M. Turing, a fellow of King's College. Cambridge, England, wrote a
paper
in which he discussed the proper
uf
such machines in connection with certain problems of mathematical logic. Ai that thine the nearest ap proach to what Dr Turing, visualised Control- was the Automatte Sequence
led Calculator which consisted of 72 mechanisms,
mechanism for multi-
three tape plication and division. feeds carrying tables off mathemail. cal functions and a purtched card in- put and exutput.
The "Brain"
These mechanisms were intercon- necled through a sort of automatic telophone exchange which acted as the "brain" of the machine. Now #
է: a device telephone relay
switching a current on or
for off- be performed of function that can
the use much higher speeds by radio valves. radio valves is the basle The
improvement on the older types of these machines which has made pos-
THE HONGKONG TELEGRAPH, SATURDAY, APRIL 5* 1947.
OYAL NAVY scientists are building high-altitude rockets- milature V24-to help their meteorologiata in long-range weather They know that the mass movements of the millions of tons of air that result in anücyclones and depressions occur chiefly in the upper atmosphere. They know that super-hurricanes with speeds up to 200 m.ph, are common there. But what causes them movements fa completely, unknown,
Pred vertically, each rocket will reach a height of 40 miles and then dozrend slowly by parachute.
As it fonts enridwards an instrument, called a radio-sonde, In the rocket will transmii. to earth signals of temperature, pressure and humidity every few seconds,
These records will help the relentists to decipher the secrets of the upper air and make weather forecasting several days ahend more
accurate.
If the rockets are a sucess they will be used by the Air Ministry, The data they provide will go into the pool of facts from which the daily weather forecast is derived.
FUN
IT'S FINDING OUT
B
RITISH meteorologists aro
NOTHER 042 of radar being perfected by
A the
at present using balloona fitted with radio-sondes to give them information about the sir up to heights of eight milos.
A recont refnement to these balloons is a covering of nylon net impregnated with silver. Ti reflecta radar 'echoes. 的
balloons, instead of being fol- lowed visually to a limit of a few thousand feat. may now be trucked by endor for 50 milles,
In this way precise knowledge of the winds-their speed and height-can be obtained, as well 16 pressure, temperature and dampness recordings.
BERNARD
WICK STEED
What use
is the moon
sible the Automatic Computing E-THERE'S a full moon who didnt were with this used
tine (A.C.E.).
to
To do its work the ACE has be provided with the equivalent of three things required by the normal-
mathematician. Firstly I'd ly human there is the paper on which the com- puter writes down his results as he
in-
I tomorrow, and if the weather is good enough like you to see what colour you think it is, be- cause I've just been reading an astronomy book which says the, moon is brown.
in- there ar goes on; necondly, structions as to what processes are to be appiled, which normally the man- thematician carries In his head: third-
ly, there are the function tables to which the mathematician makes re- ference when working out his pro- blein.
It doesn't look brown to Involve me. It looks yellow or else. These prablems storage of information or mechani-
the mechanical silvery white, and every cal
memory, and device designed for this can be call body I've asked says the
to ed upon by the logical control give up its stored information nt the same.
The internal required moment.
memory capacity of the A.C.E. will be 75,000 decunal digits.
The book which says the moon is brown was written by Sir One of the ways in which the Harold Spencer Jones, the As-
capacity of greater memory
thetronomer Royal, and, though A.C.E. shows its usefulness is I didn't doubt his word, I went
The the setting up of problems internal working of the machine will off to Greenwich Observatory to be entirely in the binary which number is
n
represem, in/ask him how he knew.
by
a series of 1's and O's, being pulses "It's perfectly simple," he
the
30
Astronomers and scientists who did
"Why isn't the earth covered with similar craters? If the moon got such a blitzing, why didn't we? And anyway the theory can't be right be cause 60,000 meteorites wouldn't
long-range detection of stormis,
Raindropa reflect radar echines, An ordinary net will pick up n heavy fulf
miles away. Special seta can do it at a range of 200 miles.
The rainstorm appears on the raclur viewing screčň as u brleht patch. Its position, 51.ዶ A03765 course can be foretold,
ten
(HEBE developments and the outcome of other research wi
T prova long-range weather forecasting. But they chit never
perfect 11. For the simplest occurrences—like a melting iceberg or a burning ship-can start a chain of events upsetting an entira weather system in a few hours.
Typhoons and hurricanes are beltered to be started by a mana of, wol air passing accidently over a small island.
Geenise Innd--especially if it is coral rock-heats up much mára than the surrounding sea, there is a strong upward current of warm air above a tropical island during the day,
When a nues of moving alt entonitera na island there is a Ludden_upsweep in its centre as it gets caught là the rising current. This tripgem off a vortex like a huge laverted wilripool which bullda up to Kantic proportions,
K.
THE WEATHER
ROCKETS
ARE NEARLY
READY
by
In the centre-the eve of the storm-there is enim. But rona Chapman Pincher
retelling as far as 100 miles, is devastating wind, accurate
Scientists višualine a chath of
Statious radar
covering fritain and giving forecasts of the arrival of rain. storms at any spot
the country.
But on the moon nothing moves and nothing but the temperature changes. The days last a fortnight, and at noon--which is a week after sunrise-the place is so hot that your blood would hull just to be there.
As such small incidents can release such enormous forces in the air, meteorology can never be an exact science. It will never be possible in quarubice a weather forecast.
THINKING
by PAUL
RIP VAN WINKLE of a girl came to London the other day. She didn't know what peace was.
In the last months of the war, when the fighting was run- ning down, she fell ill and was confined to a T.B. sanatorium at Midhurst in Sussex, where she has been since, with other as-
ALOUD
HOLT
of
if
come individuals again instead part of a tean, and our eyes are hard with discontent and calculation. And we feel sorry for ourselves in a way we never did before.
I thought that she went back to the camaraderie of her sanatorium not wholly discontented at the prospeel.
PASTORAL CENSURE ISHOP BARNES of Birmingham says we are growing stupider
favour of steriliantion.
Men would like to say soldiering, they dared. There are the genuine few who were so sickened by the squalor, the petty Immorality, the brutish cunning and stupid dis- cipline of an army that the present air of freedom is
intoxicatingly sweet to them. But the majority secretly liked their shacides, There was nothing they could do about 1fe -or death-so they reluxesh
They worked it out that they
sorted sufferers from ships and fry day and therefore he is in were living on borrowedt time; any.
All those vacant faces as seen from the pulplt have been getting, I fear, on the bishop's nerves.
ALL THE BEST
gun-sites, prison camps and motor companies.
Now here she was, a febrile gaiety in her eyes, overcharged At sunsel the temperature drops with a pent excitement in the 270 do. F. in an hour and goes middle of the black-out and the on dropping till at midnight, a week
on earth.
all fall at right angles to the later, it's far edider than anywhere blizzard, on 24 hours' leave.
moon, as they appear to have done.
come in at an angle."
"Some of them at least would have
All this was before the war.
But
now, the puny efforts of man have that this second objretion can be
demonstrated in a practical way
false.
Air photographs of bombed areas show that most of the craters look much the same, whother the bomb came in at an angle or from directly above.
The blitz has also thrown light on For another mystery of the moon," ages astronomers were puzzled by long white streaks which stretched
of the craters.
out for hundreds of miles from some
They guessed they were made of kind but dust or sand of couldn't think what caused them to
some
radiate out so evenly, over moun- fains, vaileys and plains.
and the O's the spaces between them. said. "We know the light of The answers will be given in
A thousand mil- the moon is reflected sunlight, decimal system,
and when we examine it with llon in the binary rystem has digits compared with the ten digits instruments we find it has cer- tain characteristics. So we look in the decimal system,
for something that will reflect sunlight in exactly the same streaks are thrown out from a bomb way.
clearly in chalky mail.
High Speed Work
of
be "The only thing that does this
The machine, will work at very high speeds. For instance, it is in- tended that the multiplleation Agurt numbers shall two ten
ais volcanic dust. And that is carried out in two thousandths of a second. The whole question of brown." what is a difficult and what is
will
easy
problem
an
be altered.
"Well," I said, "why doesn't Mathematient problems, which ow the moon look brown?" ing to their extreme complexity and.
"That," he replied, "is because
the enormous length of time re- quired to solve them, are so difficult
ns to be almost impossible of solu-moonlight is not very strong, tion by the pencil and paper mathe- All colours look different in inatician are well within the scope weak light, and when it's very of the A.C.E. For instance simul- taneous equations with more than weak the eye can't perceive
beyond the colour at all.
12 unknowns
еге
and time of most mathe-
"It the whole sky were mailclans, but the machine will be able to tackle equations with 50 or covered by thousands of full even 100 unknowns. Problems for moons, so that there wasn't an
used which the machine might be are the construction of range tables, inch of darkness anywhere, involving the calculation of trajec we'd still get only one-ifth as tories by small ares for various dif- much light as we do from the forent Buzz.ic velocities and sun." quadrant elevations: the calculation
of the radiation from the open end
of rectangular wave-guide; the
finding of the potential distribution
30,000 craters
outside a charged conducting cube, AN
The nuchine will cost in the re- NOTHER thing the Astrono- mer Royal said in his book tion of £100,000 to £125,000. It is unlikely that other similar machines was that no one quite knew how will ever be mode. So great Is the the moon got its craters, so I speed with which it will work, that asked him about that, too. this one machine by itself will be able to cope with all the exceeding There are 30,000 craters on ly abstruse problems for which is designed. It is also probable that the side of the moon that we during its construction, or shortly can see, and probably just as after its completion, further ad many on the other side. The vances in technique will be made theory is that they were made and subsequent machines will be designed to do even more than the by a bombardment of meteo-
A.C.E.
"It
rites.
Now they know that similar
crater. You can see them most
Had you ever thought of bombing as an aid to the study of the moon? No átmosphere BUT even the blitz doesn't explain craters, too.
why the earth hasn't 80,000
The answer to that," said the As- tronumer Royal, is that probably at one time it had.
"But the earth has an atmosphere, which means rain and wind and ice. Between them they have worn the craters dowri just as they've worn down range after range of moun- tains that have risen and disappear
ed again in the lifetime of the world, "The moon, on the other hand, has no atmosphere. There's no rain, no clouds, not even a breath of wind, and the whole place is inches deep in dust as a consequence.
one of our
"You can study it for years, and the only changes you'll see will be the lengthening and shortening of the shadows..
"If you could take telescopes to the moon and look at the earth you'd get very different picture. You'd see high and low lides and the Thanies in flood, armies. on the march and football crowds.
"You'd see the fields turn dark, then light again, as the corn grew and ripened. You'd see St. Paul's and perhaps the Queen Mary, and if you happened to be looking at the right moment, you'd see the burst of, an atomic bomb."
BY THE WAY by Beachcomber. TOMORROW, in the presence bring strange herbs to the British advertisement for
of the members of the Strabismus Expedition and
A special committee of the United vast crowd of officials, Miss Notions 1s already examining Topsy Turvey, star of "Swing methods of holding democratic elec- It, Sailor!" will break a cham- tions on the moon, if there are any inhabitants, and the Big Four are considering whether the moon shall be made a Tree City, or be governed constituted mandated territory. More about · Art
pagne bottle containing tinned apricot juice over the stern of the stratosphatic rocket, and christen it Utopia.
{
4
I
Star test
ASKED the Astronomer Royal how he knew there was no at mosphere an the moon, and he said there were lots of ways of telling. One of the easiest was to watch the moon pass in front of a star.
If there were an atmosphere the Hight of the star would be diffused and disappear gradually. Instead of that the stor vanishes suddenly. One moment it's there and a hun- dredth of a second' inter it has gonej without trace.
From the flood of her words I picked the following comments:
The black-out is much better than the one I remember.
And, of course, there's ten times as much traffic.
And ten times is much to see in the shops. My eyes nehe.
Fancy getting a meal in your tutel room again,
And a chambermaid who fills your
battle without hot-water
Being asked.
And civil servants, And champagne at 23s. a bottle. The women are getting gaver in their clothes, more colourful.
And they
walk so quickly now Venus, which does have an at- (perhaps to keep warm!).
blots out a star" more mosphere, slowly.
"Apart from causing the tides and giving people romantic ideas, the moon any use to us?" I asked.
Perhaps I should have put it more tactfully, for the Astronomer Royal seemed pained, as though I had insulled one of his friends.
"Use to us?" he said: "It's one of the most useful bodies in the sky. Why, one of the main reasons for building this Observatory was to in- crease our knowledge of the moon.
In the old days the moon pro- vided sailors with the only way of telling their longitude, and so little- was known about movements in when the
the reign of Charles II.,
Observatory was put up, that it was possible for navigators to be 900 miles out in their calculations.
Big sum
PREDICTING the exact path of the moon is one of the most difficult problems in astronomy. To tell where it will be at any parti- cular mament Involves a calculation with 1,500 separate terms in it.
"An English mathematicion named! Brown, who died recently;, spent 30 years of his life working out a set of tables to make the sum caler."
After he had finished it was found that tables could never give un ac- because curate prediction anyway. the earth has a habit of suddenly ind.unaccountably slowing down and then speeding up again.
1705, for instance. the earth began to rotate at a slower speed than usuni and the days became three thousandths of a second longer. This went on for 14 years until had the extra fractions of a second amounted to nearly a minute. Then, with equal obruptness, we got back into our stride and returned to the 24-hour day.
The way astronomers keep check on these changes is by watching the moon. They use Mr Brown's tables to predict where it ought to be, and If it's not there then they know the
1s carth
to up its tricks again. You must think a few thousandtha of a second one way or the other don't matter much, but the Astro- nomer Royal says they do. For the the earth is our master clock and it's police are keeping a watch on most embarrassing to and that it gangs who scrawl the signatures of doesn't keep perfect time. old masters on whatever they can ind. A coaching #ceno on the Lewes to Brighton road, signed Jan Van Eyck, has been confiscated, and a picture of a little girl kissing a AM kitten, signed Goya, has claimed as the
Musgrove, by International Council, or be
quIE- reported discovery, through
elenting; of what may be Romney, in northern hotel,
And. teo.
New wavelengths
MONG the things affected is, been for some reason, the allocation work of a
Mrs of frequencies for radio transmis- sion. In September 1945 a check-up on the moon showed the length of the day had changed again and, as a result, several organisations, In- A GALLUP poll to and out cluding the G.P.O., had to alter their
Undemocratic thinking.
whother people would prefer to | wavelengths,
be ovleted from their homes to make There's nothing much that we can way for (a) a satellite town, (b) do to stop this erratic behaviour of an airport, (c) a War Onice training the earth. It might be possible to
The rocket is ready to start, and the Doctor is waiting for the latest reports of interstellar and inter- planetary, weather. Asked whether the experiment, if successful, would coming on top of the National area, (d) a National Television Park, shorten the day by levelling all the the world, but we'd
a
the Doctor Gallery controversy, is sure to set or (e) o greyhound community, two only have'
pro-mountains in "ut them up again
benefit the housewife, sald: "We have reason to believe the hotels and Inna all over England duced the unanimous reply. that the vegetation on the moon cleaning frantically. Already one would rather be permitted to stay when the day needed lengthening. could be adapted for human food;; expert, summoned to examine in our homes," "That," said a So on the whole it's easier If this is so, as soon as transport suspected Constablo in a Suffolk Government spokesman, "is obvious | change our clocks and wavelengths between earth' and moon has been public-house, had to give his honestly impossible. We are not living in when necessary by frequent checies. nationallsed, we should be able to opinion that it was a rather faded the Middle Ages,"
on the old brown woon.
Sto
Well, now, what a pretty picture! The Rip Van But just one moment. Winkle girl had one more thing to our virtuc of $. We have lost fellowship, she says. We have be-
TOW dear Mr Goldwyn sets the
way. As for the danger of fighting. I did not take them long to dis- cover that the culting arm of an ariny is under 10 percent of its full complement, so the risic was about as food as twisting the last card on 15 to get Ave and under at
how good to get away
Nowind Inizing with his query: pontoon.
What
lives?
are the best years of our And
دالان
from woment
There are a few, a very few, who
Most people, when asked, shy childhood. Oh, those carefree.
spiked belleve with Browning, that jolly dreaming days of summer, grasses tickling bare legs and the grammarian-"Grow old along with
me the best is yet to be...."wt noises
thunder of the earth like against the secret ear.
aching
They happily forget the doubts of childhood, the passionate mourning over self. They forget how many times a child say to himself: When I'm dead they'll be sorry."
They forget the sickening smelt of corruption that so often assails the fresh nestrils of infancy and the horror of a child when for the first time he sees fear in the eyes of a grown-up. Or greed., Or hears his mother tell a lie.
and
the the
They say childhood because present confuses them future frightens them. They want to crmel back into their mother's arms and live in warmth and securi- ly, where the whole world smells of milk.
Make sure-
You have a
Pleasure in Store!
DO
There are those who
of honeymoons and holidays, of cricket innings and ten-pound salmon the rod. And those who dream of scoring off the boss.
on
me
For me, the best years of my life number 41 on March 22, and they will continue (barring accidents) so long as people continue to be friendly towards me and tell things I didn't know before. And this will be largely up to me.
OUT OF THE MOUTHS.... "WO schoolboys, R. W. W. and D. W. Kay, aged 13. and 11, of Epsom, have written to the papers in the protesting against the cut
-Ray that sweets ration, They they have no vote and belong to no trade union this is unfair.
Jilly Bunter would say "Yarooo!"
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