What would Feynman do? (2011)

"Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches--if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that--and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine."

Straight from the man himself. Page 79 of [PDF warning] http://buffman.net/ebooks/Richard_P_Feynman-Surely_Youre_Jok...

True, but I think he may have had some fun with the interviewer, and thought it may be worth taking him down a peg or two.

Feynman was amazingly good at giving serious smackdowns in a convivial way. He would be cheerful, accepting and charming while creating a logical argument that was almost always faultless.

He had some negatives, but I think he was one of the most amazing people to have ever lived. I encourage everyone out there to read and watch his publications and lectures. From grad student til death, he forced people to rethink the hardest and most important problems around, and he had fun doing it.

He was also a prankster, a lock-picker and safe-cracker, and apparently a pretty good musician.

</hero_worship>

If you read his books (which he dictates) he also appears to have come up with a basic concept of parallelism and pipelining which he managed to do on punchcard machines of the time by mixing up groups of different computations in the punchchard stacks based on dependent variables in the computations they were doing.

Here's another telling of the story

http://www.mphpa.org/classic/HISTORY/H-06c18.htm

The new IBM punched-card machines were devoted to calculations to simulate implosion, and Metropolis and Feynman organized a race between them and the hand-computing group. "We set up a room with girls in it. Each one had a Marchant. But one was the multiplier, and another was the adder, and this one cubed, and all she did was cube this number and send it to the next one," said Feynmann. For one day, the hand computers kept up: "The only difference was that the IBM machines didn't get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while."

Feynmann worked out a technique to run several calculations in parallel on the punched-card machines that reduced the time required. "The problems consisted of a bunch of cards that had to go through a cycle. First add, then multiply, and so it went through the cycle of machines in this room - slowly - as it went around and around. So we figured a way to put a different colored set of cards through a cycle too, but out of phase. We'd do two or three problems at a time," explained Feynman. Three months were required for the first calculation, and Feynman's technique reduced it to two or three weeks.

No, he wouldn't let her know that he knew it in advance :)

That one was much more difficult to imagine being answered by a Feynman-like persona.

This one is actually linked to in the article, where the author writes "In that tradition, I present a sequel to Keith Michaels' 2003 exercise in counterfactual reasoning. "

Fundamentally these types of questions are a tacit admission that the organization in question is incompetent at the task of identifying qualified employees.

Can you imagine hiring a surgeon, or a civil engineer, or, hell, a mechanic or carpenter based on brain-teaser questions? Nope. The interviewee would look at you like you'd grown an extra head, and probably start trying to figure out a way to bring the interview to an early end.

LED lights still get pretty hot, e.g. the big metal blob at the bottom of this one [1] is a heatsink.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/suml2Ei.jpg

The great thing about his lectures is hearing high-level physics being explained in the voice of a Brooklyn taxi driver. Always annoyed me that Asimov moderated his accent for public consumption.