Fluency with Information Technology, 6e (Snyder)
Chapter 22 Limits to Computation: Computers Can Do Almost {□Everything, □Nothing}
22.1 True/False Questions
1) When Turing developed his test, researchers believed that “natural language” was beyond the
abilities of computers.
2) The Universality Principle refers to a property of computation that all computers with a
minimal set of instructions can compute the same set of computations.
3) The Doctor program (also known as Eliza), developed by MIT researcher Joseph
Weizenbaum, clearly demonstrated that a computer does have intelligence.
4) Computers are still a long way from being perfect.
5) Medicine is one area beyond the realm of future applications of Watson.
6) One big problem Watson has to solve is simply figuring out the type of answer to look for.
7) Playing chess is much harder for a computer than playing Jeopardy.
8) Computer scientists say that an algorithm is fast if its running time grows slowly when it has
more data to work on.
1) When a computer plays chess, the information is represented in:
A) natural language
B) bits
C) black and white
D) integers
2) A conceptualization of the possible future configurations of a game is called a:
A) game tree
B) future move diagram
C) schematic answer tree
D) reachable point diagram
3) The IBM computer that is credited with beating the reigning chess grand master Garry
Kasparov is:
A) Eliza
B) Watson
C) Deep Blue
D) Deep Space Homer
4) IBMs semantic analysis system that competed on and won during a special edition of
Jeopardy!:
A) included access to the Internet
B) featured a huge database
C) lacked the ability to parse English
D) all of the above
5) In programming, rules that describe how to operate on other rules are:
A) super rules
B) advanced rules
C) metarules
D) operational rules
6) The universality principle means that
A) any problem which can be correctly represented in binary can be solved by a computer.
B) if a computer is powerful enough to solve any NP-complete problem, it can can solve any
other problem.
C) if a problem can be solved by one computer, then it can be solved by any other, though
perhaps more slowly.
D) a program that runs on one computer can be run on any other, though perhaps it will take
longer.
1) ________ is a description for computations solvable by computer in principle, but not in
practice.
2) ________ can be solved by no algorithm better than a “brute force” approach trying every
possibility and then picking the best solution.
3) The ________, determining if a computation halts for a given input, is a problem that cannot
be solved by a computer. The Loop-Checker algorithm checking for infinite loops is one
example.
4) Computers don’t understand ________, that is, the language that humans use.
5) In computer games, e.g., chess, a(n) ________ is a procedure that assigns a numerical value to
each chess piece when calculating the best possible move.
6) In chess, looking ahead to future moves is described as ________ since it involves moving
toward the lower layers of possible choices.
7) Getting two or more computers to work on a problem at the same time is called ________.
8) A(n) ________ test is an experimental setting to determine if a computer and a person can be
distinguished by their answers to a judge’s questions.
9) As the research field of ________ came into existence, a consensus grew that to exhibit
intelligence, a computer would have to “understand” a complex situation and reason well enough
to act on its “understanding.”