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Automata
An automaton (pl. automata) was originally
anything with the power of self-movement, then,
more specifically, a machine with the power of
self-movement, especially a figure that simulated
the motion of living beings. Perhaps the most
impressive such automata were those of Jacques
de Vaucanson (1709–1782), including a duck
that ate and drank with realistic motions of head
and throat, produced the sound of quacking, and
could pick up cornmeal and swallow, digest, and
excrete it.People acting in a mechanical, nonspontaneous
way came to be called automata, but this begs
the very question for which cognitive science
seeks a positive answer: “Is the working
of the human mind reducible to information processing
embodied in the workings of the human brain?”
that is, is human spontaneity and intelligence
a purely material phenomenon? René DESCARTES
saw the functioning of nonhuman animals, and much
of human function, as being explainable in terms
of the automata of his day but drew the line at
cognitive function. However, whereas Descartes’s
view was based on clockwork and hydraulic automata,
most cognitive science is based on a view of automata
as “information processing machines”
(though there is now a welcome increase of interest
in embodied automata).
The present article describes key concepts
of information processing automata from 1936 through
1956 including Turing machines, finite automata,
automata for formal languages, neural networks,
and self-reproducing automata. TURING and Post
introduced what is now called a Turing machine
(TM), consisting of a control box containing a
finite program; an indefinitely extendable tape
divided lengthwise into squares; and a device
for scanning and then printing on one square of
the tape at a time and subsequently moving the
tape one square left or right or not at all. We
start the machine with a finite sequence of symbols
on the tape, and a program in the control box.
-ranjith (p.s.y.e.c) (i ref this book)
Arbib, M. A. (1969). Theories of Abstract
Automata. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
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