Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A brief history of computers

lesswrong.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 73 posts

Re: A brief history of computers

#41

Post by javajosh »

Sharlin wrote: post #30

Boole didn’t introduce propositional logic; what he did was come up with an algebra that encodes propositional logic. Abstract algebra was a new snd developing thing back then, the idea that you can generalize from numbers and addition and multiplication to other structures that have something like numbers and addition and multiplication. Boole found that if you take the two-element set {0, 1} and choose saturating a…

And actually Boole is only dealing with two distinguishable states. Any two distinguishable physical states can be used to define binary 1 and 0. But in general, any N distinguishable states can be used to form an algebra. N=2 is just the simplest, most elegant, and what most real computers are based on. I've heard rumors that an N=3 computer exists, aka 'ternary' (EDITed) but I have my doubts. On the math side you can turn the integers into a discreet N-part thing with modulus.

Re: A brief history of computers

#42

Post by ccppurcell »

javajosh wrote: post #41
Sharlin wrote: post #30

Boole didn’t introduce propositional logic; what he did was come up with an algebra that encodes propositional logic. Abstract algebra was a new snd developing thing back then, the idea that you can generalize from numbers and addition and multiplication to other structures that have something like numbers and addition and multiplication. Boole found that if you take the two-element set {0, 1} and choose saturating a…

And actually Boole is only dealing with two distinguishable states. Any two distinguishable physical states can be used to define binary 1 and 0. But in general, any N distinguishable states can be used to form an algebra. N=2 is just the simplest, most elegant, and what most real computers are based on. I've heard rumors that an N=3 computer exists, aka 'ternary' (EDITed) but I have my doubts. On the math side you c…

The word is ternary, and Ternary Computer is a Wikipedia page you could read if you're interested.

Re: A brief history of computers

#43

Post by dreamcompiler »

Sharlin wrote: post #30

Boole didn’t introduce propositional logic; what he did was come up with an algebra that encodes propositional logic. Abstract algebra was a new snd developing thing back then, the idea that you can generalize from numbers and addition and multiplication to other structures that have something like numbers and addition and multiplication. Boole found that if you take the two-element set {0, 1} and choose saturating a…

Boole figured out Boolean Algebra, but nobody paid attention until Claude Shannon realized we could use Boolean Algebra to design digital circuits. In his masters thesis.

Very few masters theses have changed the world, but Claude Shannon's was one of them.

Re: A brief history of computers

#44

Post by grahamlee »

javajosh wrote: post #41
Sharlin wrote: post #30

Boole didn’t introduce propositional logic; what he did was come up with an algebra that encodes propositional logic. Abstract algebra was a new snd developing thing back then, the idea that you can generalize from numbers and addition and multiplication to other structures that have something like numbers and addition and multiplication. Boole found that if you take the two-element set {0, 1} and choose saturating a…

And actually Boole is only dealing with two distinguishable states. Any two distinguishable physical states can be used to define binary 1 and 0. But in general, any N distinguishable states can be used to form an algebra. N=2 is just the simplest, most elegant, and what most real computers are based on. I've heard rumors that an N=3 computer exists, aka 'ternary' (EDITed) but I have my doubts. On the math side you c…

No, Boole was dealing with probabilities. The first half of his investigation on the laws of thought is all ones and zeroes, but the second half admits any value in between.

Re: A brief history of computers

#45

Post by helf »

javajosh wrote: post #41
Sharlin wrote: post #30

Boole didn’t introduce propositional logic; what he did was come up with an algebra that encodes propositional logic. Abstract algebra was a new snd developing thing back then, the idea that you can generalize from numbers and addition and multiplication to other structures that have something like numbers and addition and multiplication. Boole found that if you take the two-element set {0, 1} and choose saturating a…

And actually Boole is only dealing with two distinguishable states. Any two distinguishable physical states can be used to define binary 1 and 0. But in general, any N distinguishable states can be used to form an algebra. N=2 is just the simplest, most elegant, and what most real computers are based on. I've heard rumors that an N=3 computer exists, aka 'ternary' (EDITed) but I have my doubts. On the math side you c…

Ternary based computers are far from a rumor.

They are flipping cool tbh. I wish more was done with the idea. Balanced ternary is beautiful.

Re: A brief history of computers

#46

Post by MostlyStable »

sdfgionionio wrote: post #31

>And from what ChatGPT tells me, it's likely that this would have been an investment with a positive ROI. Wonderful. It's interesting to me that, in just a few months, I've already developed muscle memory for checking whether or not things I read online are machine-generated. The first thing I do on any website is search for "GPT", "Bing", and "AI" and stop reading if I find them. Reading someone's writing is an exer…

It's weird to me that you are conflating asking GPT a question related to your article and writing your article. Would you have a similar reaction if he had said "according to google"? There does not seem to be any evidence at all that the author didn't write this entire article, and the fact that they explicitly reference that they consulted GPT on some related point seems further evidence that they _didn't_ have GPT write it (I think if they _had_ had GPT write it, they would have avoided mentioning GPT at all)

Re: A brief history of computers

#47

Post by howenterprisey »

MostlyStable wrote: post #46
sdfgionionio wrote: post #31

>And from what ChatGPT tells me, it's likely that this would have been an investment with a positive ROI. Wonderful. It's interesting to me that, in just a few months, I've already developed muscle memory for checking whether or not things I read online are machine-generated. The first thing I do on any website is search for "GPT", "Bing", and "AI" and stop reading if I find them. Reading someone's writing is an exer…

It's weird to me that you are conflating asking GPT a question related to your article and writing your article. Would you have a similar reaction if he had said "according to google"? There does not seem to be any evidence at all that the author didn't write this entire article, and the fact that they explicitly reference that they consulted GPT on some related point seems further evidence that they _didn't_ have GP…

Not them, but no, I wouldn't have a similar reaction if it were "according to google", because in the context of a blog posted to HN I'd expect it to mean a cursory bit of research, which is way better.

Re: A brief history of computers

#48

Post by jecel »

jchw wrote: post #34

> But the biggest thing is probably that it made assemblers and compilers possible. Well, I'm not sure if that's strictly true. Maybe you could still have them without a shared memory architecture. But the shared memory architecture made them a whole lot easier. I think the actual important part is being able to address and manipulate code like it's data somehow, rather than the specific architecture. Having two sepa…

You can have a compiler or assembler in a Harvard Architecture computer, but having separate instruction and data memories means that you can't generate the instructions and then execute them. You need some scheme to move stuff from one memory to another. Think of a PIC or AVR8, for example, rewriting its own Flash memory which isn't even the same width as the data memory.

Re: A brief history of computers

#49

Post by MostlyStable »

howenterprisey wrote: post #47
MostlyStable wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird to me that you are conflating asking GPT a question related to your article and writing your article. Would you have a similar reaction if he had said "according to google"? There does not seem to be any evidence at all that the author didn't write this entire article, and the fact that they explicitly reference that they consulted GPT on some related point seems further evidence that they _didn't_ have GP…

Not them, but no, I wouldn't have a similar reaction if it were "according to google", because in the context of a blog posted to HN I'd expect it to mean a cursory bit of research, which is way better.

In the very near future (That sentence was almost more rhetorical flourish than anything else, and while it didn't land particularly well for me personally, I find it _far_ weirder that the commenter I replied to went off about authorship and trust.

Re: A brief history of computers

#50

Post by howenterprisey »

MostlyStable wrote: post #49
howenterprisey wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not them, but no, I wouldn't have a similar reaction if it were "according to google", because in the context of a blog posted to HN I'd expect it to mean a cursory bit of research, which is way better.

In the very near future ( That sentence was almost more rhetorical flourish than anything else, and while it didn't land particularly well for me personally, I find it _far_ weirder that the commenter I replied to went off about authorship and trust.

GPT and Google results are extremely fundamentally different. I can use various heuristics to evaluate how trustworthy a site I find on Google is, and if I need to I can do any amount of research on the site itself, who wrote it, etc (and if I can't, then that's useful information too).

In contrast, GPT has no indication of where it got anything from, but even that's giving too much credit. It's just stringing words together. Whether it's wrong or right, I have no way of knowing. If I'm reading a website and I know the first thing it says is for sure correct (or incorrect) then I can judge the rest of it appropriately. That's absolutely not the case for GPT, because the correctness of each sentence is relatively (entirely?) statistically independent.

That's only the beginning of it. There are so many more ways that doing actual research is superior; there's just no contest.

I will be horrified if most searches are mediated by LLMs in the future and I will do my best to never use such a search product. (I use Kagi myself and haven't had a problem yet.)

Post reply on HN