A programmable, universal machine — the hardware realisation of an automaton — that becomes a model of intelligence once a program is supplied.
Young meets the computer mainly through the industry's wish that machines could read printed characters, and is wary of exaggerated claims for such devices.
George calls the computer a universal model “not complete until the program has been fed into it,” and introduces heuristic programming as what lets it imitate non-algorithmic human faculties.