A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

by Jimmy Soni

In fact, when it came to human superiority over machines, “thinking is sort of the last thing to be putting up a fight.” While Shannon did not expect a computer to pass the famous, and famously open-ended, Turing Test—a machine indistinguishably mimicking a human—within his lifetime, in 1984 he did propose a set of more discrete goals for artificial intelligence. Computer scientists might, by 2001, hope to have created a chess-playing program that was crowned world champion, a poetry program that had a piece accepted by the New Yorker, a mathematical program that proved the elusive Riemann hypothesis, and, “most important,” a stock-picking program that outperformed the prime rate by 50 percent. He was about half right: a computer did defeat the world chess champion in 1997, four years before Shannon’s deadline, and computers do conduct the bulk of the world’s stock trading.