The Design of a Thinking Computer

A computer that thinks like a person has long been the dream of computer designers. The author uses his 35 years of computer design experience to describe the mechanisms of a thinking computer. These mechanisms include recall, recognition, learning, doing procedures, speech, vision, attention, intelligence, and consciousness. Included are experiments that demonstate the mechanisms described. The experiments use software that the reader can download from the internet and run on his or her personal computer (PC). The software includes a large engram file containing knowledge we use on a daily basis. Additional experiments allow the reader to write and run new engrams. The computer architecture of the human brain is first described. Standard methods of computer design are next used to convert the architecture into thinking computer implementations spanning a range of performace levels. Lastly, the operation of a thinking computer is presented.