41–50 of 53 posts
ada lovelace was warned off poetry because her mom hated her dad, and pushed into science, and so she developed 'poetical science' aka general computing. (she was also inspired by embroidery card technology I think)
It's fiction, but it's very eye-opening and mind-teasing fiction that puts a lot of contemporary moving parts in motion at the same time. And the books basically revolve around the Newton-Leibniz feud over inventing calculus.
> Leibniz’s central argument was that all human thoughts, no matter how complex, are combinations of basic and fundamental concepts, in much the same way that sentences are combinations of words, and words combinations of letters. He believed that if he could find a way to symbolically represent these fundamental concepts and develop a method by which to combine them logically, then he would be able to generate new t…
Yes, I first read about Leibniz’s machine from the wikipedia page on the Entscheidungsproblem. The research on this problem eventually led to the invention of Lambda calculus and the Turing machine (formal languages for computing), which proved that such a project is impossible, as on some inputs they infinitely recurse and can’t output True or False. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem The source is M…
Leibniz is definitely an interesting person. I studied about him in philosophy, but in grad school I focused more on his contribution to the ideas of computers. Leibniz and Pascal is a good starting point in history.
What about the other 4 billion years?
> Leibniz’s central argument was that all human thoughts, no matter how complex, are combinations of basic and fundamental concepts, in much the same way that sentences are combinations of words, and words combinations of letters. He believed that if he could find a way to symbolically represent these fundamental concepts and develop a method by which to combine them logically, then he would be able to generate new t…
Yes, I first read about Leibniz’s machine from the wikipedia page on the Entscheidungsproblem. The research on this problem eventually led to the invention of Lambda calculus and the Turing machine (formal languages for computing), which proved that such a project is impossible, as on some inputs they infinitely recurse and can’t output True or False. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem The source is M…
???
They're very verbose and dense, and it strikes me that Neal Stephenson more or less wrote the three books just for himself, but it's worth checking out his "The Baroque Cycle" trilogy, culminating with "The System of the World." It's fiction, but it's very eye-opening and mind-teasing fiction that puts a lot of contemporary moving parts in motion at the same time. And the books basically revolve around the Newton-Lei…
They're very verbose and dense, and it strikes me that Neal Stephenson more or less wrote the three books just for himself, but it's worth checking out his "The Baroque Cycle" trilogy, culminating with "The System of the World." It's fiction, but it's very eye-opening and mind-teasing fiction that puts a lot of contemporary moving parts in motion at the same time. And the books basically revolve around the Newton-Lei…
The Baroque Cycle was the first thing I thought of too. Leibniz’s thinking about combinatoric representation of ideas makes a brief appearance in one of the many digressions in the trilogy.
Pretty sure Stephen Wolfram invented those.
So you are saying that Engineer's Disease is at least 700 years old.