The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

What will come along to sustain this straight line logarithmic growth curve and prevent the inevitable flattening out of the S-curve of applications? The next big area is, I believe, pattern recognition. I doubt our ability to cope with the most general problem of pattern recognition, because for one thing it implies too much, but in areas like speech recognition, radar pattern recognition, picture analysis and redrawing, workload scheduling in factories and offices, analysis of data for statisticians, creation of virtual images, and such, we can consume a very large amount of computer power. Virtual reality computing will become a large consumer of computing power, and its obvious economic value assures us this will happen, both in the practical needs and in amusement areas. Beyond these is, I believe, artificial intelligence, which will finally get to the point where the delivery of what they have to offer will justify the price in computing effort, and will hence be another source of problem solving.