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

by Jimmy Soni

Fire control was, essentially, the study of hitting moving targets. The targets were anything and everything the enemy could hurl through the air to cause damage—planes, rockets, ballistics. Imagine a gun firing a single shot at a target. Now imagine that the gun is the size of a two-story house, that it is placed on a moving Navy ship in the middle of the ocean, and that it is trying to shoot down an enemy fighter moving at 350 miles per hour. That’s a rough description of the challenge of fire control, and it was put to the mathematics group at Bell Labs, among others, to design the machines that could successfully solve that problem. Accurately determining the vertical coordinates, the horizontal coordinates, the speed of the ballistics, the likely position of the target, the time from launch to impact—all of this had to be processed by machine, without error, under fire, in split seconds.