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Dear AIS member

Chris Reynolds whose career included working with LEO Computers and as an IS academic at Brunel University posted the following:

The Surprising Connection between the Leo III and Research into the Evolution of Human Intelligence
by Chris Reynolds
10th April, 2016

In 1967 I was asked to look in detail at the Shell Mex & BP sales accounting programs which ran on their Leo 3 computers at Hemel Hempstead. The aim was to see how they might be moved to the next generation of computers - which would have computer terminals. The result was a proposal for a computer with a user-friendly symbolic assembly language called CODIL (COntext Dependent Information Language). Nearly 60 years later it is possible to link my original observations on how salesmen though about contracts with a model of how human intelligence may have evolved. This note briefly explains the link and suggests that some way should be found to re-vitalize the research.

The 1960's Shell Mex & BP sales accounts were processed by a batch processing computer system using magnetic tape as storage and paper tape as input. Its customer contract files were held on tape but were printed on about one million record cards and there were about 5000 different brand codes used for sales of a wide range of products from liquid propane gas to tar for roads. Customers varied from individual households to major organisations such as British Rail. The program I worked on was written in Intercode [The symbolic assembly language for the LEO III computers] and was probably one of the most complex commercial sales accounting programs then in existence.
I was a comparative newcomer to computers, having previously worked as a human cog in a complex international management information system. In addition I spent a year learning to program in Cleo [A high level language combining features of COBOL and Algol used on the LEO III computers]. On the day I arrived they had upgraded the system - reprinting all the customer record cards - and things had gone seriously wrong.  As a result I became very interested in computer "bugs" and how to program to minimize the dangers.
In considering the plan to move the application online there were no clear guidelines as no-one had every tried to do anything on this scale before. I proposed a system that the sales staff could understand and directly control - which meant that the system should be able to explain, in salesman language, what it was doing. I honestly had no idea that anyone would imagine this was difficult! Using my extensive background in complex manual systems I suggested a way in which the system could use the same concepts the salesmen used. A concept could be the name of a customer or brand, a quantity (goods or money), a date, the name of a standard contract, etc. etc., I found that all contracts could all be reorganized into one or more short easily understood lists and a contract-understanding interpreter could be written to work in a way that the salesmen would understand.
In retrospect what I had accidentally "discovered" was that the human short term memory cannot handle more than about seven concepts simultaneously and used this fact as the basis of a two-way language which reflected how a salesman's short term memory would handle a sales contract. When I outlined my ideas I was told that salesmen were not able to program computers so it was impossible. Despite this objection the new accounting system used "variants" based in part on my proposal.
I was not involved in this as I was "head-hunted" to join John Aris<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/26/john-aris-obituary>'s group within English Electric Leo<http://www.kzwp.com/lyons/leo.htm> Marconi, working with George Stearn on market research into the next generation large commercial systems. A few months later I suggested that my proposal could be mapped onto CPU hardware targeted at non-mathematical open-ended data processing tasks which needed good mutual human-computer understanding. I was supported by David Caminer<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Caminer> and John Pinkerton<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pinkerton_(computer_designer)> (who I understand consulted Professor Wilkes<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkes>) and was given a generous budget to program and test a simulation. This worked better than expected. Unfortunately the project was chopped because ICL<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limited> was formed and such innovative ideas were incompatible with the plans for the 2900 computer<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICL_2900_Series>.
In retrospect a more serious problem was that commercial secrecy had limited discussion about the theoretical foundations of what turns out to be a significant paradigm shift and too much emphasis was placed on getting the rather crude initial idea working - without properly understanding why it worked.
After a short break the project continued (basically unfunded) in 1971 at the newly founded Brunel University. In retrospect an environment dedicated to teaching existing technology and with no experience of supporting "outside the box" thinking was the wrong home for the project. Despite this a range of applications were explored and some interesting work was done in the Artificial Intelligence<http://www.trapped-by-the-box.blogspot.co.uk/p/tantalize-conversationalproblem-solver.html> field. From 1980 the CODIL simulator<http://www.trapped-by-the-box.blogspot.co.uk/p/introduction-to-publications-on-codil.html> was supporting significant online teaching packages and other applications. In addition an A.I. demonstration package [MicroCODIL<http://www.trapped-by-the-box.blogspot.co.uk/p/microcodil-software.html>
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