Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

Feynman is one of the few dead people I wish I could have had many conversations with while on a long hike.

His talk describing computers to a lay audience at the Esalen Institute [1] is my goto resource whenever someone asks me how computers work. It's from the same era as the referenced article, he's even wearing the same Thinking Machines shirt.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

This is probably the most important habit of Feynman, I tried to incorporate into my own life and studying:

"Then he would set to work, scribbling on a pad of paper and staring at the results. While he was in the middle of this kind of puzzle solving he was impossible to interrupt. "Don't bug me. I'm busy," he would say without even looking up. Eventually he would either decide the problem was too hard (in which case he lost interest), or he would find a solution (in which case he spent the next day or two explaining it to anyone who listened). In this way he worked on problems in database searches, geophysical modeling, protein folding, analyzing images, and reading insurance forms."

James Gleick's biography of Feynman, Genius, is a good read and complements the books Feynman wrote himself.

> first time I've seen his...extremely ugly sexist behaviour displayed

Not to excuse it, but he was the product of a different time.

What am I being downvoted for here exactly, downvoters?[0] Do people think the behaviour mentioned is at all acceptable?! Or that 'extremely ugly sexist behaviour' isn't a fair characterization? I can't see what else in what I said could cause offence. We are talking about Feynman, who believed in speaking the plain truth, pretty or not. And that story is just very creepy:

"in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said."

[0] Sorry to mention it, but this doesn't seem quite the standard case.

A very entertaining and informative essay.

Could perhaps someone try to elaborate on the calculation of buffers needed per chip?

Quote: 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.

How did he do it, conceptionally, and in practice?