In what applications have computers been most successful and in what applications have they been least successful or even useless?
What will be an ideal response?
Computers are ubiquitous today in both control systems, and human systems. The microprocessor has brought low?cost controllability to almost any system, from the washing machine to the automobile. Microprocessors are at the heart of digital cameras, mobile phones, MP3 players, iPads/tablets and GPS systems.
Probably the first really successful popular use of the computer was word processing. It allowed countless millions to create and manipulate documents at home. With the growth of communications technology, the microprocessor gave us the web and distributed information – not to mention computer games and multimedia. All these are successes. One of the most surprising and unanticipated products of the microprocessor revolution was the spreadsheet. That revolutionized commerce.
Computers have probably been least successful in the field of artificial intelligence; that is, the mimicking of human behavior. Certainly, the humanoid robot (e.g., Asimov’s robots) that has a very long history in SF has not emerged. Nothing remotely like it has appeared. Operations that are apparently simple to humans, such as speech understanding, have not been fully achieved (there are, of course, some respectable speech recognition and understanding systems such as Apple’s Siri, but these are not yet perfect). Similarly, robots cannot generally perform operations that we regard as easily; for example, climbing stairs. We have created excellent special?purpose robots (e.g., in the automobile world) but nothing that comes close to a machine with humanlike capabilities.
You might also like to view...
Which of the following is an example of a click-and-brick business?
A) eBay B) Barnes and Noble C) Amazon D) Yahoo!
With any configuration change in X Window, you must restart X Window for the change to take effect.
Answer the following statement true (T) or false (F)
You want to shift eight statements from a scene method to a shot method. The easiest way to do this is to drag a(n) ____ into the original scene method and then drag the eight statements we want to cut from the original scene method into that ____.
A. moveScene block B. moveAndOrientTo block C. doScene block D. doInOrder block
The cout stream object's insertion operator function can be ____________________ to process user-defined class objects.
Fill in the blank(s) with the appropriate word(s).