Deep Thought
Chalk one up for humans. In October, Garri Kasparov, the world's premier chess master, beat Deep Thought, the world's premier chess-playing computer program.
In spite of this defeat, the silicon competitor boasts several prestigious victories over human grand masters. Jim Adams of the Association for Computing Machinery predicts that a computer will be the world champion within four years. Look out, Kasparov.
Deep Thought was developed by a team of five Carnegie-Mellon University graduate students. !n November, Deep Thought headed for the 20th Annual North American Computer Chess Championship in Reno, Nevada, where it tied for first place with Hitech, another Carnegie-Mellon chess-playing computer. —RICHARD C. LEINECKER
- The HeadStart Ill-CD (right) runs CD-ROM software on an AT-class platform.
Looks like CD-ROM for PCs is finally out of the starting gate with the release of two home PC platforms from HeadStart Technologies.
The LX-CD has a suggested retail price of $ 1,995, without a monitor. It features a 5!A-inch CD-ROM drive with stereo sound, a 40-megabyte hard disk, a high-density 3'/2-inch floppy disk drive, VGA graphics, headphones, serial and parallel ports, and a mouse. It is powered by an 8088 microprocessor at 4.77/10 megahertz, comes with 768K of RAM and 256K of video RAM, and offers Five expansion slots and a 101-key keyboard.
The HeadStart III-CD is an AT-class machine running at 8/12 megahertz with one megabyte of RAM. It adds to the LX-CD features a second serial port, a joystick port, an additional expansion slot, and a portable external modem. It retails for $2,995 without a monitor.
With both systems, users get a library of software on CD-ROM discs, including MS-DOS 3.3H (a special version for HeadStart that allows for partitions greater than 32 megabytes), GW-BASIC, Publish-It!. Splash!,
PCs, touchscreens, and videodiscs work together in this adult-literacy program.
Leading to Reading
An experimental program helps improve the reading comprehension of adults with only basic reading skills. Through newspaper articles, the program teaches readers how to tie sentences together and grasp the overall meaning of a story.
Displaying articles from the morning edition of the Philadelphia Daily News, the program asks students to relaie an action, feeling, thought, or situation to something else in the same paragraph. The voice synthesizer says unfamiliar words or sentences for the students, and the touchscreen lets them use the program without typing.
Developed by an IBM scientist and researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia, the system uses an IBM personal computer, a videodisc, a voice synthesizer, and an IBM Info Window touchscreen monitor to display text and video onscreen.
Dr. Don Nix, the IBM researcher who created the program, said lhat comprehending the overall meaning of the separate sentences in an article is a common problem with low-proficiency readers.
"The text appears as a set of disparate sentences. The One Thing Leads to Another program helps Ihe students make inferential connections necessary for reading comprehension," Nix explained.
In addition to the newspaper articles, students can also watch full-length feature films on the computer screen. Written text accompanies the films and explains the onscreen action. —DENNY ATKIN
Twist & Shout, The New Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia, Microsoft Bookshelf, and several other packages.
HeadStart said that it had agreements with software publishers to release future CD-ROM disc-based packages at under $100. The company did not say that it would make its CD-ROM technology available on a 386 platform, although a spokesperson said the firm was considering it. Many industry observers think the 386 is a more sui table piece of hardware for CD-ROM applications. —PETER SCISCO
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