Ed Fredkin has died | Hacker News Reader

Ed Fredkin has died

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123 pointsmasswerk31 comments

As a young kid right about to go to college I got to meet Ed (probably 24 years ago now). He was easy to talk to and seemed eager to share knowledge. I remember him showing me some of his work on a Mathematica workbook.

He told me a story about how the phone dial tones were designed with 2 frequencies such that a human wouldn't accidentally make those sounds while talking. But he figured out how to simultaneously hum and whistle to mimic a dial tone. The phone company guys were in disbelief but loved the MIT folks (the first phreakers) because they would keep finding vulnerabilities in the phone system. That story was fascinating to me and was my first intro to the hacker mindset.

Ed was one of those OG hackers. May he rest in peace.

I recommend reading "ghost in the wires", I can't speak for how genuine all the stories are, but it's a whirlwind of phreaking and hacking

> But he figured out how to simultaneously hum and whistle to mimic a dial tone.

And there I was, humbly whistling in front of this comment.

I managed to humwhistle "11*". Though the detector [0] might have a different accuracy than me.

[0] https://nhollmann.github.io/DTMF-Tool/

Hahahha amazing!

I produced "D##DDD##D*DD*DD00*00*133009". This is fun.

> because they would keep finding vulnerabilities in the phone system

that is certainly rewriting history there! The FBI was involved more than once, several young men went to jail over this. You said "loved" ? thats actually twisted to say that

yeah thats how I remember it

I don't have a date for that story - but I would expect it was before the widespread adoption of Touch Tone in 1963... And maybe the authorities were more lenient then, as well as with faculty. I think this was probably late 50s or early 60s. I imagine DTMF was deployed at MIT before it was done nationwide. Not trying to rewrite history - just saying theres a lack of detail in my comment and yours.

The probably first reported hacking incident (in the modern sense, as in computer assisted phone phreaking) was at MIT using a PDP-1 to connect various tie-lines between MIT and Harvard, and reaching out on tie-lines to the Millstone Radar Facility, the Sudbury defense installation, IBM Kingston/NY, and to the MITRE Corporation, while redirecting the long distance call fees to a local radar station. As reported in "The Tech", 20 Nov. 1963 issue[0]. It doesn't seem that this had any serious consequences, though. Carlton Tucker, MIT’s telephone system administrator, is quoted with (while expressing warnings regarding future liabilities), "we don’t have too much trouble with the boys; we appreciate their curiosity."

[0] http://tech.mit.edu/V83/PDF/V83-N24.pdf

The above URL seems to be dead, see: https://thetech.com/issues/83/24/pdf

Ed Fredkin, once known as "world's best programmer", passed away on June 13, compare the Tweet by Dag Spicer (CHM senior curator). This links to Ed Fredkin's oral history [0], which is full of amazing stories and well worth reading.

[0] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10263050...

Also compare the previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36326390

I first learnt about him from a very interesting book, "Three scientists and their Gods".

I think the chapter about him is excerpted in this Atlantic piece:

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/88apr/wright.ht...

Three Scientists and their Gods is such a good book! Almost anything by Robert Wright has been a must buy for me ever since!

Fredkin’s Self-Replicating Cellular Automata:

Sum the neighbors, modulo 2, and assign to the cell on the next timestep.

Astonishingly this allows patterns to replicate in multiple directions across the plane. https://cellpylib.org/fredkin.html

Works with any kind of lattice. Even works in 3D.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin

Ah. One of his masterpieces the Fredkin gate: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin_gate

I've been watching since the original cast in the 70's. I don't know much about what he did as a writer on the show, but I didn't care for him as a performer. Strangely, I did get a kick out of his Stewart Smalley character. As silly as it was, there was something genuine he brought to it, and that made it work for me.

I'm not from Minnesota, but he impressed me by what it seemed he tried to do as a senator. I think if more of our politicians showed his intelligence and level of care for their constituents, we'd all be better off.

Finally, I think he got screwed over when he was pressured to resign over his hover-hands picture. If we cancel everyone who has done something in poor taste, we'd all be on the outs, and no one would go into comedy, or last long if they did.

This submission is about Ed Fredkin not Al Franken (who is still alive).

One of the companies he started, Information International, played a significant role in the history of computer graphics: https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/6-3...

An interview with Ed Fredkin during the Triple-I Reunion October 14th, 2014: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZKOq5_Vcp4GGdZHCzKzr...

I believe, Triple-I was initially founded as an AI firm, powered by Ed Fredkin's own PDP-1. (I guess, since the first commercial CAD system by Itek and Adams Associates was also on a PDP-1, the transition happened quite naturally. Ben Gurley, the PDP-1's designer, who tragically happened to be shot at the family dinner table in 1963, was also at Tripple-I at the time. Ed Fredkin was quite fanatic about the PDP-1 and probably its best ambassador. He also chaired the PDP-1 restoration project at the CHM.)

I worked at iii in the late ‘70s, and my desk was in the cubicle next to the movie group’s. I loved looking over the divider to look at the latest pictures from Westworld (Yul Brinner with a photogrammetry grid) or Tron, or a teapot. Fun stuff.

Westworld (the old one) was absolutely groundbreaking.

I much enjoyed his pursuit of a fundamental discrete physics program.

In the end the universe probably doesnt work this way but one the charms of the human mind is its ability to conjure up alternative plausible models.

RIP

Dang, this deserves a black stripe.

"According to biographer Robert Wright, the character Stephen Falken in the film WarGames was modeled after Fredkin." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin]

https://archive.org/details/threescientistst00wrig

Memories by Paul Abrahams:

https://paulabrahams.substack.com/p/memories-of-ed-fredkin

In a comment, I mentioned the Three Scientists and Their Gods profile (which someone else in the comments has also mentioned) and also that Fredkin was apparently the ultimate origin of a very widespread anecdote about overfitting in machine learning:

https://gwern.net/tank

Fredkin’s Paradox is a powerful idea that I find myself referencing often:

"The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them—no matter that, to the same degree, the choice can only matter less."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox

RIP. I loved Three Scientists and Their Gods and had the privilege of seeing him speak at CMU in 2001. He was hysterical and brilliant.

Its a reversible operation right? Right!?

I posted this a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36429420

DonHopkins 7 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend

>[...] with a probable origin in a speculative question in the 1960s by Edward Fredkin at an AI conference about some early NN research [...]

RIP Edward Fredkin, who recently passed away on June 13, 9 days ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin

>Edward Fredkin (born October 2, 1934, died June 13, 2023) was a distinguished career professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and an early pioneer of digital physics.

>Fredkin's primary contributions include work on reversible computing and cellular automata. While Konrad Zuse's book, Calculating Space (1969), mentioned the importance of reversible computation, the Fredkin gate represented the essential breakthrough. In recent work, he uses the term digital philosophy (DP).

>During his career, Fredkin has been a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at Caltech, and Research Professor of Physics at Boston University.

Ed Fredkin - Reversible Computing (Keynote from the CCC's Workshop on Reversible Computing)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROv1HX-gdas

Fredkin tells a great story about making Stephen Wolfram's eyes pop out of his head by showing him how to transform his own rule into a reversible rule.

Reversible Computing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing

Fredkin Gate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin_gate

Digital Physics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics

Conservative Logic, by Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli

https://web.archive.org/web/20061017232512/http://www.digita...

Digital Philosophy

https://web.archive.org/web/20170729191558/http://www.digita...

Google Scholar: Edward Fredkin

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5QMmygwAAAAJ&hl=en

Rudy Rucker writes about his CAM-6 in the CelLab manual:

Cellular Automata Laboratory: Fourmilab home: Origins of CelLab: Classical Era: Von Neumann to Gosper

http://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/chap5.html

>Computer science is still so new that many of the people at the cutting edge have come from other fields. Though Toffoli holds degrees in physics and computer science, Bennett's Ph.D. is in physical chemistry. And twenty-nine year old Margolus is still a graduate student in physics, his dissertation delayed by the work of inventing, with Toffoli, the CAM-6 Cellular Automaton Machine.

>After watching the CAM in operation at Margolus's office, I am sure the thing will be a hit. Just as the Moog synthesizer changed the sound of music, cellular automata will change the look of video.

>I tell this to Toffoli and Margolus, and they look unconcerned. What they care most deeply about is science, about Edward Fredkin's vision of explaining the world in terms of cellular automata and information mechanics. Margolus talks about computer hackers, and how a successful program is called “a good hack.” As the unbelievably bizarre cellular automata images flash by on his screen, Margolus leans back in his chair and smiles slyly. And then he tells me his conception of the world we live in.

>“The universe is a good hack.”

[...]

ON THE SOUL: Ed Fredkin, Unpublished Manuscript

http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/...

>The John Cocke Theory of Dreams was told to me, on the phone, late one night back in the early 1960’s. John’s complete description was contained in a very short conversation approximately as follows:

>“Hey Ed. You know about optimal encoding, right?”

>“Yup.”

>“Say the way we remember things is using a lossy optimal encoding scheme; you’d get efficient use of memory, huh?”

>“Uh huh.” “Well the decoding could take into account recent memories and sensory inputs, like sounds being heard, right?”

>“Sure!”

>“Well, if when you’re asleep, the decoder is decoding random bits (digital noise) mixed in with a few sensory inputs and taking into account recent memories and stuff like that, the output of the decoder would be a dream; huh?”

>I was stunned.

@dang, respectfully but forcefully echoing others here: this merits a black stripe.

I currently work nights in the same timezone as dang. It should happen fairly soon, but normal people are just rolling out of bed right about now.

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