“Human computer”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

The term "computer", in use from the early 17th century (the first known written reference dates from 1613),^[1] meant "one who computes": a person performing mathematical calculations, before electronic computers became commercially available.

"The human computer is supposed to be following fixed rules; he has no authority to deviate from them in any detail."{{sfnp|Turing|1950}}

Teams of people were frequently used to undertake long and often tedious calculations; the work was divided so that this could be done in parallel. Frequently, the same calculations were performed independently by separate teams to check the correctness of the results.

Since the end of the 20th century, the term "human computer" has also been applied to individuals with prodigious powers of mental arithmetic, also known as mental calculators.

Origins in sciences

The approach was taken for astronomical and other complex calculations. Perhaps the first example of organized human computing was by the Frenchman Alexis Claude Clairaut (1713–1765), when he divided the computation to determine the time of the return of Halley's Comet with two colleagues, Joseph Lalande and Nicole-Reine Lepaute.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=22–25}} Human computers were also involved in plotting the future movements of astronomical objects to create celestial tables for almanacs in the late 1760s.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=29–30}} The computers working on the Nautical Almanac for the British Admiralty included William Wales, Israel Lyons and Richard Dunthorne.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=30}} The project was overseen by Nevil Maskelyne.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=29}} Maskelyne would borrow tables from other sources as often as he could in order to reduce the number of calculations his team of computers had to make.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=31}} For some men such as Johannes Kepler, assisting a scientist in computation was a temporary position until they moved on to greater advancements. Women were generally excluded, with some exceptions such as Mary Edwards who worked from the 1780s to 1815 as one of thirty-five computers for the British Nautical Almanac used for navigation at sea. The United States also worked on their own version of a nautical almanac in the 1840s, with Maria Mitchell being one of the best-known computers on the staff.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=61}}

Other innovations in human computing included the work done by a group of boys who worked in the Octagon Room of the Royal Greenwich Observatory for Astronomer Royal, George Airy.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=50}} Airy's computers, hired after 1835, could be as young as fifteen and they were working on a backlog of astronomical data.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=50–51}} The way that Airy organized the Octagon Room with a manager, pre-printed computing forms and standardized methods of calculating and checking results (similar to the way the Nautical Almanac computers operated) would remain a standard for computing operations for the next 80 years.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=54}}

In the 1870s, the United States Signal Corps created a new way of organizing human computing to track weather patterns.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=77}} This built on previous work from the US Navy and the Smithsonian meteorological project.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=76}} The Signal Corps used a small computing staff that processed data that had to be collected quickly and finished in "intensive two-hour shifts".{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=76–77}} Each individual human computer was responsible for only part of the data.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=77}}

Women were increasingly involved in computing after 1865.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=81}} Private companies hired them for computing and to manage office staffs.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=81}}

In the late nineteenth century Edward Charles Pickering organized the "Harvard Computers".{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=82–83}} The first woman to approach them, Anna Winlock, asked Harvard Observatory for a computing job in 1875.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=82}} By 1880, all of the computers working at the Harvard Observatory were women.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=82}} The standard computer pay started at twenty-five cents an hour.{{Sfn|Sobel|2016|p=31}} There would be such a huge demand to work there, that some women offered to work for the Harvard Computers for free.{{Sfn|Sobel|2016|p=105}} Many of the women astronomers from this era were computers with possibly the best-known being Florence Cushman, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and Annie Jump Cannon, who worked with Pickering from 1888, 1893, and 1896 respectively. Cannon could classify stars at a rate of 3 per minute.{{Sfn|Evans|2018|p=23}} Mina Fleming, one of the Harvard Computers, published "The Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra" in 1890.{{Sfn|Sobel|2016|p=37}} The catalogue organized stars by spectral lines.{{Sfn|Sobel|2016|p=37}} The catalogue continued to be expanded by the Harvard Computers and added new stars in successive volumes.{{Sfn|Sobel|2016|p=181}}

In 1893, Frances Galton created the Committee for Conducting Statistical Inquiries into the Measurable Characteristics of Plants and Animals which reported to the Royal Society.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=106}} The committee used advanced techniques for scientific research and supported the work of several scientists.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=106}} W.F. Raphael Weldon, the first scientist supported by the committee worked with his wife, Florence Tebb Weldon, who was his human computer.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=106}} Weldon used logarithms and mathematical tables created by Crelle and had no calculating machine.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=106–107}} Karl Pearson, who had a lab at the University of London, felt that the work Weldon did was "hampered by the committee".{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=107–108}} However, Pearson did create a mathematical formula that the committee was able to use which allowed for data correlation.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=108}} Pearson brought his correlation formula to his own Biometrics Laboratory.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=108}} Pearson had volunteer and salaried computers who were both men and women.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=110}} Alice Lee was one of his salaried computers who worked with histograms and the chi-squared statistics.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=111}} Pearson also worked with Beatrice and Frances Cave-Brown-Cave.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=111}} Pearson's lab, by 1906, had mastered the art of mathematical table making.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=111}}

Mathematical tables

Human computers were used to compile 18th and 19th century Western European mathematical tables, for example those for trigonometry and logarithms. Although these tables were most often known by the names of the principal mathematician involved in the project, such tables were often in fact the work of an army of unknown and unsung computers. Ever more accurate tables to a high degree of precision were needed for navigation and engineering. Approaches differed, but one was to break up the project into a form of long distance work from home piece work. The computers, often educated middle class women who society deemed it unseemly to engage in the professions or go out to work, would receive and send back packets of calculations by post.^[2] The Royal Astronomical Society eventually gave space to a new committee, the Mathematical Tables Committee, which was the only professional organization for human computers in 1925.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=173}}

Fluid dynamics

Human computers were used to predict the effects of building the Afsluitdijk in the Zuiderzee. The computer simulation was set up by Hendrik Lorentz.^[3]

A visionary application to meteorology can be found in the scientific work of Lewis Fry Richardson who, in 1922, estimated that 64,000 humans could forecast the weather for the whole globe by solving the attending differential equations numerically.^[4] Around 1910 he had already used human computers to calculate the stresses inside a masonry dam.^[5]

Wartime computing and electronics

Human computers, both men and women, were involved in calculating ballistics tables during World War I.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=151–152}} In between the two world wars, computers were used in the Department of Agriculture in the United States and also at Iowa State College.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=164}} The human computers in these places also used calculating machines and early electrical computers to aid in their work.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=166}} In the 1930s, The Columbia University Statistical Bureau was created by Benjamin Wood.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=190}} Organized computing was also established at Indiana University, the Cowles Commission and the National Research Council.{{sfnp|Grier|2005|pp=195}}

Human computers played integral roles in the World War II war effort in the United States, and because of the depletion of the male labor force due to the draft, many computers during World War II were women, frequently with degrees in mathematics. In the 1940s, women were hired to examine nuclear and particle tracks left on photographic emulsions.{{Sfn|Light|1999|p=459}} In the Manhattan Project, human computers, working with a variety of mechanical aids, assisted numerical studies of the complex formulas related to nuclear fission.^[6]

Following World War II, the NACA used human computers in flight research to transcribe raw data from celluloid film and oscillograph paper and then, using slide rules and electric calculators, reduced the data to standard engineering units. Margot Lee Shetterly's biographical book, Hidden Figures, documents the contributions of African American women who served as human computers at NASA.^[7] NACA had begun hiring black women as computers as early as 1940.{{sfnp|Evans|2018|pp=24}} One such computer was Dorothy Vaughan who began her work in 1943 with the Langley Research Center as a special hire to aid the war effort.^[8]

As electrical computers became more available, human computers, especially women, were drafted as some of the first computer programmers.{{Sfn|Light|1999|p=462}} Because the six people responsible for setting up problems on the ENIAC (the premiere general-purpose electronic digital computer built at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II) were drafted from a corps of human computers, the world's first professional computer programmers were women including Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas.^[9]

Human-assisted computation

The term "human computer" has been recently used by a group of researchers who refer to their work as "human computation".{{sfnp|Law|von Ahn|2011}} In this usage, "human computer" refers to activities of humans in the context of human-based computation (HBC).

This usage is questionable for the following reason. HBC is a computational technique where a machine outsources certain (not necessarily algorithmic) tasks to humans. In fact, most of the time humans in the context of HBC are not provided with a sequence of exact steps that needs to be executed to yield an answer. HBC is agnostic about how humans solve the problem. This is why the term outsourcing is used in the definition. The use of humans as "human computers" in the context of HBC is very rare.

Origins in sciences

Mathematical tables

Fluid dynamics

Wartime computing and electronics

Human-assisted computation

See also

Bibliography

References

External links