The definition of mechanical brain

Let's imagine a railroad line with four stations marked in­put, storage, computer and output. These stations are joined by little gates or switches to the main railroad line. We can imag­ine that numbers and other information move along this rail­road line, loaded (погруженные) in cars. Input and output are stations where numbers or other information go in and come out respectively. Storage is a station where there are many plat­forms and where information can be stored. The computer is a special station, somewhat like a factory. When two numbers are loaded on platforms 1 and 2 of this station and the command is loaded on platform 3, then another number is produced on plat­form 4.

There is a tower, marked control.This tower runs a telegraph line to each of its little watchmen standing by the gates. The tower tells them when to open and when to shut which gates. Now we can see that as soon as the right gates are shut, cars loaded with information can move between stations. So by clos­ing the right gates, we can flash (отражать) numbers and in­formation through the system and perform operations of rea­soning. Thus we receive a mechanical brain.

In general, a mechanical brain is made up of: a quantity of registers where information can be stored; channels along which information can be sent; mechanisms that carry out arithmetic and logical operations; a control, which guides the machine to perform a sequence of operations; input and output devices, where information can go into and out of the machine; and at last electricity, which provides energy.