Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine
longnow.org
longnow.org
And this really amazes me: "Since the only computer language Richard was really familiar with was Basic, he made up a parallel version of Basic in which he wrote the program and then simulated it by hand to estimate how fast it would run on the Connection Machine."
With no CS background he wrote a version of Basic that scaled up to 16,000 CPUs ... most CS PHd's would find that non-trivial. And he did it in a few weeks.
I guess that's what makes Feynman Feynman.
Oh, this is pretty funny too: http://www.fleen.com/uploads/2007/11/what-would-richard-feyn...
Another is (apparently) Fermi, from WP: "Walking into the lab one day, Smyth saw the distinguished scientist helping a graduate student move a table, under another student's directions." He seems to be among the awesomest people to ever walk the earth.
"Because even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. And whatever he understood, he could make others understand as well. Richard made people feel like a child does, when a grown-up first treats him as an adult. He was never afraid of telling the truth, and however foolish your question was, he never made you feel like a fool."
Great article. I didn't know Danny Hillis was such a talented writer. I love reading Feynman's books and about him because it gives me a glimpse of what the world looks like to a creative genius (which is closer to a child than an adult) and how intelligence can be applied to any problem.
Back then, even, Feynman determined how to split up the work among several people, in effect, he paralellized the computation.
Danny Hillis is indeed a good writer. Even his Ph. D dissertation where he describes Connection Machine is quite interesting to read (as far as Ph D dissertations go!).
Bit of trivia - the CMs were programmed in Lisp. Why Lisp?
As per Danny Hillis: "Lisp was chosen... for a combination of technical and social reasons. On the technical side, Lisp is extensible, has dynamic storage allocation, and is generally good for symbol manipulation. In addition, excellent Lisp programming environments already exist. On the sociological side, most members of the AI community, for whom the Connection Machine was originally designed, are already familiar with Lisp".
"In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress."
Thank you.