New Project to Let Harvard Students Learn to Control Computers in Hour

A new project now being carried out at the Aiken Computation Lab may eventually enable large numbers of Harvard students to solve computer problems without learning computer language.

Project Tact (Technological Aids to Creative Thought) will also be a valuable teaching aid in many lecture courses in a year or two, Adrian Ruyle, staff mathamatician, said yesterday.

The project is being carried on solely by Harvard, but with the use of an RW400 computer at Santa Barbara, Calif.

A small number of Harvard students are now testing the problem solving ability of the computer system. Glen Culler and his associates at Santa Barbara designed the system which a student can operate with one hour of instruction.

All a student needs to do is type out a problem and watch the answer computed before him on a television console. Previously anyone who wanted to operate a computer had to know Fortran or some other machine language.

Super Computer

Anthony G. Oettinger, Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics, and a director of Tact, foresaw large possibilities for the project once it gets out of the experimental stage. He said that Harvard will lease a giant IBM 360 computer next June that will be used solely in Project Tact.

Thirty television consoles in addition to the present two will be installed along with the new computer. These consoles, he said, could theoretically be placed anywhere in the University that is connected by a Harvard steam tunnel.

Ruyle said he thought that the consoles along with the typewriters necessary to type out the problem could even be placed in Harvard or Radcliffe dormitories where students could conceivably do homework.

New Courses

In the Spring two new Harvard courses will test the feasibility of the system's use as a lecture aid. Ruyle himself will teach one of the new courses, a revised version of Math 20b. He hopes to use Culler's system to quickly compute graphical techniques used in solving differential equations.

William Bossert, assistant professor of Biology, will teach the other new offering, Biology 17, Population Genetics. Bossert had even hoped to include a laboratory using the new system, but Harvard's daily three-hour time limit on the system's use along with the demands of Ruyle's course precluded the possibility.

Ruyle is still seeking students who have computer problems that might be able to aid in the project's investigations. He said, however, "to deter anyone who might want to fool around for an hour just for kicks before a Bogie flick, that students who use Tact's facilities will have to write up a critical analysis of their experience with the equipment." He also said that by the Spring most of the computer's time will be taken up by the two new courses.