Volume 6 reflects the editors’ conviction that application of digital computers to areas akin to human thinking—machine-aided cognition, to borrow a term from another environment—is one of the most active frontiers of development in our time. Articles in this volume deal with two such areas: information retrieval and what is called “ultraintelligent machines.”
The survey articles included in Volume 5 have been selected with two aims in mind: to arrive at a balanced sampling of the computer field, and to emphasize the subjects of most active current interest. Articles cover topics such as the role of computers in delivering election results; the state of computer development in the Soviet Union and its neighbors; artificial intelligence; and applications of computers to the design of optical instruments, to nuclear reactor design, and to the determination of the structure of crystals or molecules from X-ray diffraction patterns.