Soctological Aspects 
organic chemistry or biochemistry into the programme of my 
computer. In theory this ought to be done, but because the 
results would not justify reading so much into the computer 
programme and building a correspondingly large machine, I 
therefore reserve to myself the possibility of posterior judgment 
as to how I would draw an inference; I could trust such a process 
of judgment just so far as I felt that I could programme it. 
Huxley: Machines, so far as I know, are not able to do what 
many people of genius have done in making scientific dis- 
coveries, which is to arrive at the result by a process which can 
only be called intuition or imagination—of course superposed 
on a great deal of earlier study and thought. Can machines, 
given the necessary detailed biological information, ever 
grasp the complex pattern of a situation as a whole and come 
to a sudden intuition of the right judgment? 
Lederberg: Surely you are describing your own inability to 
describe the machine by which one could arrive at such con- 
clusions? What goes on inside the computer also seems to be 
unconscious, or intuitive, to you. 
Huxley: As comes out in Hadamard’s book, many have 
made their discoveries in this way, completely by-passing the 
process of logical step-by-step analysis. 
Crick: It does appear that a machine could be made which 
would do the equivalent of intuitive thinking, but that we 
cannot make such a machine yet. I know that MacKay feels 
there are some theoretical limitations to what can be done with 
machines, but it is not very obvious exactly what these limita- 
tions are. Some of the more trivial objections, such as “‘ You 
can’t make a machine to play a better game than you yourself 
can’’, are certainly not true. You can also make a machine 
which will discover a theorem. 
Huxley: Can you make a machine which has an affective 
component as well as a cognitive component? 
MacKay: In answer to Dr. Lederberg, I did not say that 
the predictor has less right than anyone else to influence the 
election. I said it was wrong that he should be able to do so 
unrecognized, under the guise of giving information. In other 
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