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Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

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Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#41

Post by lb1lf »

wvbdmp wrote: post #29

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!

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#43

Post by froh »

fooker wrote: post #15
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #2

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…

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 (Ge…

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

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#44

Post by jcranmer »

croes wrote: post #31
kens wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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.

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#45

Post by fooker »

froh wrote: post #43
fooker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (Ge…

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…

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.

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#46

Post by dirkt »

lb1lf wrote: post #41
wvbdmp wrote: post #29

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…

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

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#47

Post by eis »

tancop wrote: post #35
eis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 themselv…

> 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.

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#48

Post by eis »

mejutoco wrote: post #20
eis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#49

Post by lb1lf »

dirkt wrote: post #46
lb1lf wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#50

Post by chuckadams »

eis wrote: post #48
mejutoco wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.
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