http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine..."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.
The decision to ignore Feynman's analysis was made in September, but by next spring we were up against a wall. The chips that we had designed were slightly too big to manufacture and the only way to solve the problem was to cut the number of buffers per chip back to five. Since Feynman's equations claimed we could do this safely, his unconventional methods of analysis started looking better and better to us. We decided to go ahead and make the chips with the smaller number of buffers.
Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the chips the machine worked. The first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life."