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Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

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Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#31

Post by taeric »

lqet wrote: post #7

Kind of off-topic, but one thing that really confuses me about Shannon's biography is the following: according to the authors of "A Mind at Play", Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1983 [0], and the illness progressed "very quickly". They continue: > In too-brief moments, the family was given a flash of the Claude they knew. [His daughter] Peggy remembered that she “actually had a conversation with hi…

Those examples are ones that can happen without knowing where you are, or who exactly you are currently talking to. Dementia can take that away, as well; but often people notice people with dementia not engaging directly and specifically with them in the now.

As an example, my grandparents would often think I was my father when I would visit them. If I tried to get them to talk to me, as me, expect confusion and nothing to make sense. Let them just talk, though, and what they were saying would make sense. Especially once I realized they were largely taking up a context I just wasn't in.

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#32

Post by jgwil2 »

lqet wrote: post #7

Kind of off-topic, but one thing that really confuses me about Shannon's biography is the following: according to the authors of "A Mind at Play", Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1983 [0], and the illness progressed "very quickly". They continue: > In too-brief moments, the family was given a flash of the Claude they knew. [His daughter] Peggy remembered that she “actually had a conversation with hi…

If he was diagnosed in 1983 and lived until 2001, then he is in the 99th percentile in terms of years of life after diagnosis. To say that his illness progressed "very quickly" is probably just incorrect, relatively speaking.

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#33

Post by dmd »

prophesi wrote: post #9

Highly recommend giving The Bit Player[0] a watch for those interested in learning more about Claude Shannon and their pursuits in both their academic and personal life. [0] https://thebitplayer.com/

My wife worked a bunch on this film, and it's absolutely great. (Among other things, she handles IP requests for the MIT Museum, where much of Shannon's stuff is kept.)

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#34

Post by madcaptenor »

jll29 wrote: post #28

Quote from Wikipedia: "The Claude E. Shannon Award was established in his honor; he was also its first recipient, in 1973." That must be a bit awkward to receive a prize named after yourself. - Turing never won the Turing Award. - Knuth did, but he never won a Knuth award. - Dijkstra "kind of" won the Dijkstra Prize: he won the PODC Influential Paper Award, which was renamed after Dijkstra's death to Dijkstra Prize h…

I was wondering if there were other examples. Google "people who won prizes named after them". The results I got from the "AI Overview" were:

Helen Dunmore The first winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize, in 1996 for her novel A Spell of Winter

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch Won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea. The Booker Prize trophy is named "Iris" after her.

Walter Payton Won the NFL Man of the Year Award in 1977. The award was named after him after his death in 1999.

Taylor Swift Won the Taylor Swift Award at the 2016 BMI Pop Awards, becoming the second artist after Michael Jackson to have an award named after them.

Stuart Parkin Won the Draper Prize in 2024 for developing spintronic devices that allow for cloud storage of large amounts of digital data

The first and last ones are true but irrelevant. The others are legitimate but not exactly what we're talking about here (it turns out that the Taylor Swift Award was just given that one time; it's not like they gave it to her in 2016 and then kept giving it to other people in future years). The Walter Payton case is kind of analogous to the Dijkstra one. The Taylor Swift case would be like the Shannon one if they'd kept giving it out.

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#35

Post by entropicdrifter »

bee_rider wrote: post #22
lqet wrote: post #7

Kind of off-topic, but one thing that really confuses me about Shannon's biography is the following: according to the authors of "A Mind at Play", Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1983 [0], and the illness progressed "very quickly". They continue: > In too-brief moments, the family was given a flash of the Claude they knew. [His daughter] Peggy remembered that she “actually had a conversation with hi…

I wonder, is it possible that the symptoms of Alzheimer’s could be partially masked by being good-natured and very intelligent? Like maybe Alzheimer’s would sort of… drop him into conversations without context, but then he’d work out the context and try to give advice anyway?

Sounds like a good-natured genius's way to handle that kind of scenario to me, FWIW

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#36

Post by entropicdrifter »

FredPret wrote: post #16
machiaweliczny wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve watched vide with guy that supposedly has 200IQ and in his view IQ is ability to focus on small on small set of things but many high IQ ppl can’t „refocus” it easily and aren’t doing well in life.

A 200 IQ is not possible at current population levels. It’s a statistical measure comparing the test taker against the average, much like percentiles. At a certain IQ score, somewhere in the 170’s I think, the expected number of individuals with that IQ is about 1. If we had absolute measures of intelligence (that would be a breakthrough for the ages), then we could say “A is twice as smart as B” and award A twice th…

>EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could use the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved as a proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is to answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better than nothing.

Wouldn't that be roughly equivalent to equating brain size/volume to intelligence? I know there's a decent correlation between intelligence and head-size, but it's not that consistent. Some brains just work better for their size.

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#37

Post by warner25 »

jasonhong wrote: post #13

Some more fun facts about Claude Shannon, from this New Yorker article ( https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/claude-s... ): He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the s…

My favorite fun fact is that, sandwiched between his revolutionary work on circuits and information theory, his actual PhD dissertation was on genetics; like something kind of unrelated to the rest of his life's work and largely forgotten. As a current PhD candidate, I think about that a lot.

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#38

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

jasonhong wrote: post #13

Some more fun facts about Claude Shannon, from this New Yorker article ( https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/claude-s... ): He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the s…

Ah yes, the "Useless Machine". Fun little thing to build...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#39

Post by FredPret »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #36
FredPret wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 200 IQ is not possible at current population levels. It’s a statistical measure comparing the test taker against the average, much like percentiles. At a certain IQ score, somewhere in the 170’s I think, the expected number of individuals with that IQ is about 1. If we had absolute measures of intelligence (that would be a breakthrough for the ages), then we could say “A is twice as smart as B” and award A twice th…

>EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could use the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved as a proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is to answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better than nothing. Wouldn't that be roughly equivalent to equating brain size/volume to intelligence? I know there's a decent correlation between intelligence and head-size, but it's not t…

That’s why it’ll be a proxy that will get better over time as AI architectures converge towards optimality.

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#40

Post by ahazred8ta »

warner25 wrote: post #37
jasonhong wrote: post #13

Some more fun facts about Claude Shannon, from this New Yorker article ( https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/claude-s... ): He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the s…

My favorite fun fact is that, sandwiched between his revolutionary work on circuits and information theory, his actual PhD dissertation was on genetics; like something kind of unrelated to the rest of his life's work and largely forgotten. As a current PhD candidate, I think about that a lot.

An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics (1940) -- https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5312088 -- https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11174 -- Bear in mind, this was a Mendelian analysis almost 20 years before they worked out that DNA was a sequence of nucleotides.
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