Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

A nice essay. This paragraph stood out for me:

"By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman’s router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as “the average number of 1 bits in a message address.” I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of “the number of 1’s” with respect to time. Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman’s equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman."

Feynman is great, very amusing and obviously brilliant. But I've also worked with folks like him before who end up as fish out of water in fields they don't know the conventions for and can't be bothered to learn.

Lots of time is wasted trying to figure out how to get the rest of the company to communicate with the lone genius, and it's obvious that they're smart enough to go away for a week and learn enough of the field they're working in to try to use the language and vocabulary of that field to be minimally effective.

I've been on the receiving end of these kinds of analysis and the result is that they seem to exist purely to showcase how smart the individual is and to provide no other meaningful input to the effort. In this case the engineers ignored Feynman, did their own analysis anyways and followed their own conclusion...the subtext here is that multiple people were not getting along with Feynman's way of doing things.

He turned out right in the end of course, because Feynman, but there's lots of people who think they're Feynman and aren't and it's hard to tell the difference sometimes.

Well actually in the next few paragraphs they do end up trusting Feynman's analysis and go with 5. And it worked.

I wonder what Feynman would be working on if he was a programmer today.

Feynman died almost 30 years ago ... I think it's pretty safe to assume it's not recent news, even without the (1989)