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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

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Re: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

#21

Post by martincmartin »

Houshalter wrote: post #6
bane wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

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

I think you and the parent are agreeing. :) They didn't know what to make of Feynman's analysis, because it used techniques they weren't familiar with. It was clearly an approximation; were the error terms really ignorable?

They only used 5 when it turned out they couldn't manufacture 7 and had no other choice. So they only trusted his analysis out of desperation / wishful thinking, not out of objective reasoning.

Re: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

#23

Post by anaerobia »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #2

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 st…

This is an application of mean field approximation. See the O'Reilly book Data Analysis with Open Source Tools by Philipp Janert, page 175-178.

Re: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

#24

Post by Senderman »

varjag wrote: post #15
bane wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> 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 he had a Nobel prize in physics on his hands for starters, that's one way to tell the difference. Granted, noone's infallible, but it's a good predictor. Not that it would have spared him from fizzbuzz on the interview these days..

>Well he had a Nobel prize in physics on his hands for starters, that's one way to tell the difference.

With the preface that I know that a higher calibre of comment is expected from me in this community, it's still the truth: I lol'd.

Re: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

#25

Post by anaerobia »

gbromios wrote: post #19

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality. I've never seen this article before, and I…

A reprint of it is in the book Feynman and Computation edited by Anthony J.G. Hey. You can find it in Amazon or your local library.

Re: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

#26

Post by howfun »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #17

Both of a friend's parents worked on the Manhattan Project. Feynman was a character. I was fortunate to be able to write code for version 1 of the Connection Machine (that was the SIMD device) and I would prototype code on my Mac in Star Lisp. Good times that I am grateful for.

Write more about this. A lot of people will find it very interesting.

Re: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

#27

Post by CuriouslyC »

aj7 wrote: post #7

Cellular automata-- a dead end.

Cellular automata are just a subclass of graph evolution algorithms constrained to a regular grid comprised of homogeneous nodes. Neural networks are also graph evolution algorithms, and logical programs can be modeled this way as well.

Cellular automata are just a toy branch of a tree that is thriving like crazy.

Re: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

#28

Post by jschwartzi »

bane wrote: post #4
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #2

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 st…

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 f…

On the flip side, it's also frustrating to know you're right about something, but because your co-workers don't have the same education as you they completely ignore you.

Re: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

#29

Post by mpfundstein »

howfun wrote: post #26
mark_l_watson wrote: post #17

Both of a friend's parents worked on the Manhattan Project. Feynman was a character. I was fortunate to be able to write code for version 1 of the Connection Machine (that was the SIMD device) and I would prototype code on my Mac in Star Lisp. Good times that I am grateful for.

Write more about this. A lot of people will find it very interesting.

+1

Re: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

#30

Post by [deleted] »

howfun wrote: post #26
mark_l_watson wrote: post #17

Both of a friend's parents worked on the Manhattan Project. Feynman was a character. I was fortunate to be able to write code for version 1 of the Connection Machine (that was the SIMD device) and I would prototype code on my Mac in Star Lisp. Good times that I am grateful for.

Write more about this. A lot of people will find it very interesting.

[deleted]
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