The Irrational Computer

How did the computer, a machine built for logic and calculation, come to model the messy human mind? To answer that, ‘The Irrational Computer’ breaks with a familiar narrative of rationalization and quantification that stretches from the Enlightenment to the Cold War. Against this story of rational mastery, this project shows how influential British and American engineers came in the middle of the last century to see controlled chaos as essential to machine intelligence. They intentionally injected randomness into otherwise deterministic systems to achieve their desired result: ‘a slight error of reasoning’. Archival records, technical reports, internal memos, and popular coverage reveal the appeal and controversy of randomness in the history of AI. Rooted in theories of invention, modernist art, and wartime mathematics, notions of randomness allowed engineers to mechanize and materialize murky conceptions of creativity, intuition, and the unconscious. The evidence is abundant, but the argument is simple: today’s AI emerged from the conviction that replicating original thought required modelling not only logic but something deeply human, in other words, the irrational.

Cold war · controlled chaos · Creativity · deterministic systems · history of artificial intelligence · Intuition · Irrationality · modernist art · Randomness · rationalization · unconscious · Cybernetics and Technology in Society · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Computing Technologies