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Description
The untold story of the woman who invented Artificial Intelligence.
"Put it on my tomb: 'This is what she was trying for.'"
Sixty-five years ago, a middle-aged woman working with a small group of collaborators out of a converted shed on the outskirts of Cambridge predicted the future of Artificial Intelligence. Her story has been unknown and her work forgotten – until now.
Beginning with an extraordinary discovery in the archives of the women's college she helped found, Peter de Bolla pieces together the story of Margaret Masterman and the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU).
As world powers raced to discover and exploit the capabilities of the first computers during the Cold War, Masterman emerged from obscurity to become an unlikely prophet of artificial intelligence. Misunderstood, deplatformed and ultimately erased from history, Masterman and the CLRU not only cracked the problem of machine translation (MT), but accurately theorised how the 'electronic brain' might work – guided by Masterman's vision of a computer that would be more than a machine, but a companion to human minds: A machine with which to do philosophy.
This is the story of a woman nobody wanted to listen to, but whose uncredited work shapes our contemporary world.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- Accessibility request contact
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
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Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified (font, spacing, colors)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
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- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
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Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
1. 'One day it will be possible to do think with machines'
2. 'Learning to generalize freely and fancifully': Masterman at Newnham, 1929 -1933
3. From theatre to commune: 1933-1951
4. Thinking machines: 1947-1952
5. The foundation of the CLRU: 1953 – 1956
6. Testing to destruction: 1957
7. The mechanization of thought processes: 1958 – 1961
8. Freeing the mind: 1962
9. 'I don't have words, I have phrases': The Sands Hotel, Las Vegas, 1965
10. 'Language is a dynamic corporate memory device': The breakthrough of 1968
11. 'Put on my tomb “This is what she was trying for”'
Appendix I: Timeline of early MT research.
Appendix II: Significant papers and publications of Margaret Masterman.
Product details
| Published | 15 Oct 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 9781350643017 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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