Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding | Hacker News Reader

Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

heise.de

167 pointsvirtualritz81 comments

https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/sachsen/bautzen/bautzen-hoyer... (auf Deutsch)

Zuse is probably the most under-appreciated thinker of the 20th century. Everybody's heard of Claude Shannon, von Neumann, Feynman, and all the rest of 'em, but Zuse's enormous contributions have received rather little attention.

To summarize a couple of the highlights:

In 1936 Germany, Konrad Zuse began developing the Z1, a mechanical calculating machine programmed via perforated 35mm film. By 1937, he had broadened its architecture toward universal digital computation in the vein of Alan Turing. Although completed in 1938, the machine struggled with mechanical inaccuracies -- the same challenge which plagued Charles Babbage's much earlier work on the Difference Engine. Zuse overcame these mechanical hurdles in 1941 with the Z3, an operational digital computer capable of universal computation.

In fact, the Z3 was the world's first working machine physically capable of universal computation. The first real computer.

Zuse was also one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. In a book he published titled "Calculating Space," He was the first to surmise that our universe is computable by a deterministic computer program. Every "simulation hypothesis" and "mathematical universe" theory is downstream of Zuse. (One could argue that the Pythagoreans and neo-Pythagoreans, who held that the world was at root mathematical, were truly first, but Zuse made important and original contributions nevertheless.) It's important to note that, to this day, there are no physical observations which contradict Zuse's notion, as he wrote it, of a computable universe.

I would think that the German state or EU should provide funding for his museum. If that's not the case, it's a shame.

There are also no physical observations that contradict the notion of God. The problem is that no such observations are even possible, or at least no test they could be put to that could disprove the theory.

The notion of god leads immediately to paradoxes and logical contradictions when thinking it through a little bit. It's fine if people have certain believes but let's not put religion on the same level as physics. No such paradoxes exist with the notion of a deterministic computable universe.

I concur with the OP when they said Zuse is being waaay underappreciated. He is one of the fathers of the modern computational age.

> to this day, there are no physical observations which contradict Zuse's notion, as he wrote it, of a computable universe.

This was the claim, and OP has a point, which you are misinterpreting as religion vs physics.

The person I replied to compared religion with physics (god vs deterministic computable universe). I said those are not remotely equally defensible theories.

I did not compare religion with physics, I compared one completely unfalsifiable cosmological theory with another.

Everything leads to paradoxes or unanswerable questions when you think it through. If our universe is computable then what "computer" is it running on? Why is our universe as computationally strong as it is and not more or less? Is it a simulation and if yes who is simulating it? Is there an infinite tower of universes each running progressively weaker (as in they can do less complex computation) versions of themselves? And if not then where does it stop and why?

Even the deterministic part has problems, like why does quantum mechanics appear random when it's not or why we see ourselves as having free will. Science can never answer the first one and the second will always be an open question because explaining why something evolved in nature is hard.

A god is no better or worse than alien simulations, or an infinite multiverse, or the anthropic principle (aka giving up), or any other possible explanation for why the universe is the way it is.

> Everything leads to paradoxes or unanswerable questions when you think it through. If our universe is computable then what "computer" is it running on? Why is our universe as computationally strong as it is and not more or less? Is it a simulation and if yes who is simulating it? Is there an infinite tower of universes each running progressively weaker (as in they can do less complex computation) versions of themselves? And if not then where does it stop and why?

None of the things you listed are paradoxes. A paradox is something that is self-contradictory.

> Even the deterministic part has problems, like why does quantum mechanics appear random when it's not or why we see ourselves as having free will.

Something can easily appear random when it is in fact not. Any random number your computer gives you is not truly random. Any hash looks random but is completely deterministic.

> A god is no better or worse than alien simulations, or an infinite multiverse, or the anthropic principle (aka giving up), or any other possible explanation for why the universe is the way it is.

Hard disagree. Not all attempts at explanations are equally valid or invalid. Some are more "out there" than others. And it should not stop us from trying to understand the universe more and more.

> to surmise that our universe is computable by a deterministic computer program

Please an expert chime in to complement, but I believe simulation in quantum mechanics is a quite interesting and not so simple topic.

I believe the more correct thing to say is that quantum mechanics is approximable than simply computable. Don't forget, QM and current physical theories use real numbers, which are not digitally representable; although it seems also the case that information is locally bounded. The finite distribution of states and probabilistic dynamics is I believe is fundamentally what makes information bounded, (which forbids for example naive hypercomputation and I think several paradoxes that might arise from unbounded local information) but don't forget in general the dynamics is still based on continuous quantities as far as we know, not discrete quantities like in a computer. QM is about discrete states within a continuum set interacting with continuum dynamics, I think is accurate to say. Quantum field theory probably complicates things more but similar conclusions might be valid. This continuum dynamics can't be computed exactly, at most you could achieve a pretty good approximation; you'd also need to provision probabilities, either from pseudorandomness (which technically would invalidate the probabilistic model, although in practice this invalidation is not feasibly distinguishable by an observer of current human-scale computing power) or gathering environmental noise.

It's really interesting to me how nature is kind of surprising and defiant of simple hypothesis we come up with. But I think each of those characteristics plays a role, is an important part of existence somehow, and we should keep trying to understand why each aspect of nature is the particular way it is for their numerous insights into our condition and existence.

Any text/program/formula describing a real number can be represented as an integer number, therefore there's only a countable amount of real numbers that can be worked with.

I agree about the continuum only allowing an approximated simulation by Turing computation. But that’s orthogonal to QM, you already get that with classical fields. In Everettian QM, the evolution of the quantum state of the universe is still deterministic, following the Schrödinger equation. There is no probabilistic aspect in simulating it as a whole.

Regarding the continuum, the final word hasn’t been spoken with regard to the physical world, and probably also with regard to mathematics, since there is some level of controversy about the continuum even in the foundations of mathematics. We know for example that the continuum hypothesis is independent of ZFC, so what’s up with that. It might very well turn out that there is no continuum in physical reality. However, it seems highly unlikely that it’ll be anything like the naive conception of a cellular automaton.

While we model our world as continuous quantities, doesn't QM give the necessary leeway here by imposing limits on measurement? If you computed fields as grids with grid points that are half a plank length apart, then added some "quantum noise" (just good pseudorandom noise in the right distribution), could we tell?

For things like light frequencies I believe we are not even sure if they are truly unquantized, so they might be discretely computable for all we know

Time is the tricky one. But if you get away from computing the whole universe and just try to compute the viewpoint of one observer that might be quite solvable

You missed some important points that explain why he's not celebrated.

His efforts received enormous amounts of funding from the Nazis.

Much of his specialized 'computers' were explicitly for the war effort, including planes.

He was a big fan of utilizing computing for racial and genealogy research. The Nazis had plans drawn out to murder orders of magnitude more people based on this sort of research had they won (Generalplan Ost).

It was not like he was forced at gunpoint to participate, he was all in for the funding. Much like Von Braun, but did not have the luck to be paperclipped.

Same can also be said of IBMs computers at the time and the US efforts to build computers.

Sure, winners writing the history is a tale as old as time.

Initially received funding, later in the war they turned it off as "not war worthy"

You might be surprised how many UK and US scientists of that time supported eugenics, see for example https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-238014

and as for computers and atrocities, see IBM's history from the time or perhaps some more recent tech companies.

Few of us are saints.

You'll find that the computing pioneers we celebrate by name are largely detached from the examples you mentioned.

to my understandung this strong "fascist" hypothesis is hypebole. he was member of a conservative student association, however those were prohibited by the Nazis.

correct is that he was a conservative engineer who happened to be intelligent and live in that era, and who was lucky enough to work in his domain instead of dying a cannon fodder somewhere. did they build weapons? sure thing. does that make him a convinced fascist? certainly not.

he wasn't even member of the NSDAP party.

here is a short biography based off complete archive material:

Deutsche Biographie - Zuse, Konrad https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118637436.html

Where did I mention he was a fascist or a nazi?

There's a huge difference between "a conservative engineer who happened to be intelligent and live in that era" and leading a weapons lab attracting enormous amounts of funding, and fantasizing about how computing could be used to advance race science research.

> fantasizing about how computing could be used to advance race science research.

mind to share sources to that part? that's saying "Nazi" btw.

https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/a-701465.html

https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/article/der-erste-computer-d...

> that's saying "Nazi" btw.

No more than allowing chips on drones makes Nvidia/Intel VPs terrorists, but there's certainly culpability.

What do you think Alan Turing was working on?

Konrad Zuse also seems to have been a pioneer in the concept of self-replication and self assembly.

Check out this cool crank-powered self-assembling tower thing that he made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odwgpKRnWM8&t=1s

And his work on self replication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxv4vDMOFCo

I know very little about Zuse or his work and I lament that this museum is closing down as I am moving to Europe next year and had intended to use the opportunity to research his work.

Neil Gershenfeld has a quip that "computer science is the worst thing to happen to both computers and science because it prematurely froze the model of computation around 1950s designs' and I think there's some truth to this. The resource limitations that Zuse experienced in Germany during the depression and war that forced him down a design path of mechanical design over electromechanical and exposed him to the more fundamental idea that computation is ultimately a physical process -- 'there's no such thing as software just different states of hardware'. I have a feeling that the next big technological revolution will be based around self-replicating machines that more fully unify computation with matter.

The argument that the Z3 is universal "was an impressive party trick, but diverged entirely from the way the machine was designed, how it was actually used, or indeed from anything that would have made sense in the 1940s."

Source: ENIAC in Action p255.

> Nevertheless, the Z3 was Turing-complete – how to implement a universal Turing machine on the Z3 was shown in 1998 by Raúl Rojas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)

The Z3 lacked conditional branching. The hack to make it technically a universal Turing machine is to execute all possible branches of a program and discard the undesired branch results, so the end result is the same as if it had genuine branching abilities. But of course that'd drastically drive up the computation time if you actually tried to use the machine in that way.

Yes, even Rojas says, "From a practical perspective, and in the way the Z3 was really programmed, it was not equivalent to modern computers." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3330654_How_to_make...

Who said it has to be equivalent to modern computers?

One of the things about Turing-completeness is that it is very easy to become accidentally Turing-complete, since the conditions you need for completeness are very weak. (Famously, C++ template instantiation is unintentionally Turing-complete).

Z3 is an example of an accidentally Turing-complete machine.

> Z3 is an example of an accidentally Turing-complete machine.

Kind of easy to let that pass though, given the "imitation game" wasn't even introduced by Turing until way after the Z3 machine was completed.

The imitation game (aka Turing test) has nothing to do with Turing completeness.

With the important exception of "infinite tape". That always gets forgotten.

> there are no physical observations which contradict Zuse's notion, as he wrote it, of a computable universe.

There is no model capable of simulating the universe either.

I also wonder what such an observation would have to look like. Observations per se are unique and recorded and therefore can be reconstructed via trivial computation. Which brings us to the laws of physics. You may believe that they are utterly wrong and the universe is deterministic after all, but then the burden of proof is upon you.

It has been said -- I believe by Stephen Wolfram, who owes a very great deal to Zuse -- that the universe is "computationally irreducible." In other words, and particularly in this case, that every particle would need to be simulated by a similar particle or equivalent mathematical representation. And thus that any (quantum) computer running a simulation of our universe would need to be the size of the universe, and would require the energy of the entire universe.

In any case, the laws of physics are not yet settled, and determinism is still a very live option. The notion of a continuum is, to me, even more bizarre than the notion of a deterministic universe -- and is also more bizarre than Everett's notion of a "wave function of the universe."

I think Zuse is underrated because he worked pretty much alone. The other names and particularly Von Nuemann were prolific collaborators apart from being very good at what they do. There’s probably a takeaway from how this turned out.

He also worked on the loosing side of a world war.

>I would think that the German state or EU should provide funding for his museum. If that's not the case, it's a shame.

There is another Museum of his, which is still funded.

It is still a shame that the city which called itself Zuse-City does not try harder to keep it. I know how hard their financing situation is first hand but the ZCOM as a place and education institute was more worth then they understood.

Sad, but the reality is, Hoyerswerda is a small town in east east Germany and computer museums are already super niche in general. How many tourists could they possibly get? Maybe the Nixdorf museum in Paderborn can snatch it up. Paderborn is no metropolis either, but at least it’s relatively central and the museum gets 13 times as many yearly visitors.

Funny you should mention it, I was aware of the Zuse museum and figured I'd jump on a train next time I was in Berlin to go check it out. (In fairness, I've been thinking this the past four or five times I've gone to Berlin, on the assumption the museum would only get better while I procrastinated...)

Anyway, three minutes ago, after reading about the museum's likely fate (sigh!) on HN, I've booked tickets to Berlin in October.

Hoyerswerda or bust!

I had the same idea, but it's already closed for the public starting 1st of September [1] (so tomorrow).

Also, this museum is closer to Dresden than to Berlin...

[1] https://zuse-computer-museum.com

September 1st! Eeek!

(Do note I try to go to Berlin once or twice a year to visit friends - so the news of the (more impending than I realized!) closure of the Hoyerswerda museum simply made me get this fall's visit booked...)

I haven't been to the Deutsches Technikmuseum since October 2024, so I'll probably make another visit there.

2h23 by train from Berlin isn't too bad

It's closed, but the planned events are on-going till 31st of December 2026. If there is an event in the list that suits you're agenda, you can still see the museum.

https://zuse-computer-museum.com/angebote/veranstaltungen/

I hope the Deutsches Technikmuseum (Berlin) still has that corner dedicated to Zuse. It was there when I visited in 2019.

And overall, I'd wager you'd nerd snipe yourself at DT anyway. Not just with computers but with trains, waterships, aeroships cameras---you name it. That's an easy ~5h to kill at least. I only had to leave because I got tired. The curiosity is strong but the legs are, alas, fragile.

It was still there in spring 2026!

Indeed. I've lived in Germany for 25 years, and I had to Google where it is. If 10% of the local town came to visit every year, that'd still only produce 8 visitors per day. The numbers just don't make sense.

For every bit of history there is 'the danger period', when it is still recent enough that most people don't consider it special but old enough that special effort needs to be made to preserve it. Random chance as much as anything else determines what eventually makes it to the status of 'precious antique'. I hope they find a way to mothball it until society is more appreciative, I think it is a unique collection and worth preserving.

The work of Zuse is way out of the danger zone, isn't it? Mobile phones with LCDs are in the danger zone, or the phone booth, but not the first working computers ever build.

Location, location, location. It's just in the middle of absolutely nothing. The surrounding has a bit of nature as appeal but it's depression county in regards of everything else.

I think Hoyerswerda is to this day best known for something that happened in the early 90s: Local neo-nazis rioted against and physically attacked some foreign contract workers and asylum seekers while the local police watched and did nothing.

I had to check, and it’s indeed in Saxony. The state does not have a great history with xenophobia.

Oh. I know Hoyerswerda from the film Gundermann, not for the neo-nazis.

It’s sad to see how the American propaganda destroyed the true genius of computation, to a point that there is not even a museum for his work. Imagine doing the work of many, and many years before them, and then getting here.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad-Zuse-Museum_H%C3%BCnfel...

Apart from a quite a few museums having his machines (or replicas).

What's the American propaganda piece of it?

On behalf of all Americans, I would like to apologize that our propaganda prevented you from reading the article and understanding that the Museum has existed for his work for some time. Furthermore, I apologize that our propaganda is so strong that not even the Deutsche themselves could overcome it to learn about one of their own scientists, visit and financially support the museum of one of their countrymen.

I guess its only a matter of time until we put the final nail in Röntgen's coffin and the Deutsche finally start using the proper term: X-rays.

The problem was probably in the location. Hoyerswerda is a place which does not attract visitors, even the locals left in droves (isn't it the German record holder when it comes to cities losing population?)

In Dresden, Leipzig or Berlin, 30.000 visitors a year could have been reached.

I think Hoyerswerda was chosen for a reason: funding money should not always go to the big city and so they thought why not built it where Konrad Zuse went to school? It kind of makes sense...

I get the idea, but it was probably unrealistic to expect that Hoyerswerda would become a pilgrimage location for geeks. It is a real periphery from the point of view of DE, CZ and PL alike, and the museum didn't really do much to let itself known either. 30 thousand visitors yearly is 100 daily, that is quite a lot. You'd need to be known around the entire Central Europe to hope to reach such numbers.

I like exhibitions of this sort and I might have taken the 500 km long trip to see Zuse's museum, if I knew about it. I am only learning now.

From the point of view of PL it is now perfect. Directly connected by Eurocity train but only since a year or so.

> the museum didn't really do much to let itself known either

Sure. But you can only do so much with probably not even a handful people and limited budget...

The bulk of Polish population is concentrated elsewhere and the closest big cities (Szczecin, Poznan, Wroclaw) are all more than 200 km away. Warsaw or Upper Silesia, with its masses of people, twice as far.

I wouldn't call this perfect...

I've seen some of his machines in Technology Museum in Berlin. The first iteration was mechanical done with cleverly cut out metal plates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)

Playlist showcasing the current restoration work: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtpOUadaBh31n6Pdscwhwopmh...

Although Zuse definitely received too little credit in the West (for somewhat understandable political reasons), there's another Zuse museum in Hünfeld, along with exhibitions at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin. So this is not as profound as it might seem. I suspect the main problem with this museum was just that it's off the beaten path.

That's exactly what I was going to say. I saw that pretty nice exhibit on Zuse in the Deutsches Technikmuseum. Perhaps it could be merged in? (Although I doubt it's that simple)

Yes the Berlin exhibit is really well done with some beautiful artifacts well displayed and explained. The Z1 replica is a marvel: Zuse himself built in 1989.

IIRC they also have sensible documentatioin about his Nazi connections that puts this work into appropriate context.

It’s such a nice museum, and yes the Z1 is mesmerising.

Interesting that this pops up on HN. It was a real nice spot and I'm sad that it goes away. They had really nice holiday activities for kids, but also for adults and elderly. E.g. I myself tried VR the second time in one of the rooms from ZCOM.

I especially enjoyed ZCOM when at one point the Fabmobil visited them and I learned a couple of nice people. Not only computer hacking people but also craftsmans etc too.

Also a couple of times the ZCOM gave us space for our computer club (PPP, rip) in the hope we can benefit from each other. But unfortunately the interests stick to a few great "hardcore" people only, although we offered great and free pizza ;)

Fun times. Not even too long ago...

Hopefully can be consolidated into an existing museum. Very specific museums are just hard to run in general worldwide unless they are uber famous and often that fades in a generation or two.

I wonder why they post such an article after you already can not go. If they did it earlier, they would have provided the museum with some more final visitors.

There were a few articles before that too. E.g. the currently linked heise article is from June.

That's a real shame.

I first heard of Zuse when I spent a week in class in the Zuse conference room at DEC Spit Brook Road, Nashua aka ZKO1. (there were many rooms in that facility named after computing pioneers...)

There were pictures of Zuse and the Z3 in that room, but also an original Konrad Zuse oil painting. I wonder what happened to that painting...

There is a wonderful working relay replica of his design, alongside some artifacts, at the Enter museum in Solothorn Switzerland. Also a bit in the middle of nowhere (15 minute bus from a train station on the Zurich-Bern route).

Maybe we could replace the link with the mdr.de? Heise.de violates GDPR law by using a "pay for play" model.

I am sorry for the meta comment but websites like these should be on the black list imho (and it escapes me why the german watch dog is sleeping at the wheel so often).

The reason the German gdpr watchdog is not complaining about Heise is because what they are doing is completely legal: you can still disable the tracking with the "more options" below.

Current legal doctrine is that _forcing_ payment (i.e. cash for privacy) is not allowed, that does not mean you cannot offer a subscription that disables tracking: you just have to offer a free option as well, which they do.

IIRC it is required that rejecting tracking is as easy as accepting it?

Maybe I am misunderstanding something but the cookiewall says:

  Datenverarbeitungen von Werbeanbietern einschl. personalisierter Werbung mit Profilbildung.
  Zustimmung erforderlich für kostenfreie Nutzung

This reads to me like you either pay with cash or your privacy, no?

It needs to move and raise funding.

That is a tragic news… I wish I’ve heard of it in advance…

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