Introduction

Abstract

While it may be said the world of yesterday always belonged to the people with the best military weapons (recently the atomic bomb), it seems quite likely that the world of tomorrow will belong to the nation with the best robots. The last milestone passed by science in her onward career is the construction of machines which can make independent decisions, i.e. machines (or electronic circuits) whose course of action is determined by whether or not certain conditions have been fulfilled. It is such machines which we shall here call automata, and which are sometimes also given the more emotionally charged name of robots (a word of Czech origin *)). If, however we took this as a definition of an automaton, it would seem that the history of such devices extends right back to the start of history, and perhaps even further. For example, a lock also fits this definition: it depends on the shape of the key (the condition) whether the lock opens or not (the decision = the way in which a process is continued). In other words, one might be tempted to think that in this field too there is nothing new under the sun; but this would be a false conclusion. With the coming of the automaton, something new has indeed appeared. Someone who would call a lock an automatic device has overlooked the fact that the lock lacks one of the most essential features of the automaton, namely that an automaton is intended to be automatic. We could thus rephrase our definition as follows: an automaton is a machine intentionally designed to be able to make decisions.