51–60 of 73 posts
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…
> I'm confused though. Babbage came up with the blueprints for his Difference Engine in the 1820s. I know he never succeeded at actually building it, but he never really had a fair chance if you ask me. Babbage had a chance to build his difference engine. The problem was that the engineering was a lot harder than he thought it was going to be, and he was a mathematician/economist, not so much a working engineer. The…
> The problem was that the engineering was a lot harder than he thought it was going to be This is true of many (most?) innovations. E.g. the steam engine: people knew about steam power, and built primitive steam engines. Watt succeeded eventually in manufacturing one that had the right mix of reliability, power, cost, maintainability to be widely useful. E.g. the jet engine : Whittle conceived of turbine aircraft po…
>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…
At least this author states openly that they used ChatGPT. In a couple of months such honesty will be rare.
>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…
Yes.
Though at least with Google, the author still gets a chance to somewhat evaluate the links they are given.
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…
Rumours? This is the internet. Rumour to research is a few clicks away.
They did exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
> I'm confused though. Babbage came up with the blueprints for his Difference Engine in the 1820s. I know he never succeeded at actually building it, but he never really had a fair chance if you ask me. Babbage had a chance to build his difference engine. The problem was that the engineering was a lot harder than he thought it was going to be, and he was a mathematician/economist, not so much a working engineer. The…
A Swedish family, called Scheutz, finished the Difference Engine within a few years after Babbage gave up, and sold them very profitably for many decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Georg_Scheutz It wasn't too hard for the time... Babbage just kept getting distracted.
I don't recommend reading this. There are many gaps and a lot of important history missing, including: 1. Computation before ~1800. Abacus, Napier's Bones, Slides rules, Pascal's Calculator, motivations from celestial navigation and astronomy. 2. Modern analog computers ~1900-1950. The author seems to refer to them as "math machines" and leaves it at that, without exploring much deeper than that they were used for be…
Author implies (in the quote above which occurs after the discussion of the invention of personal computers) that the early personal computers from the 1970s did not use microprocessors. This of course is false: All the early "personal computers" used microprocessors. For example the IMSAI used an 8080, the Apple II used a 6502, and the TRS-80 used a Z80. Microprocessors -- which were never intended to be the basis for entire general-purpose computers -- were repurposed for exactly that application by visionaries like Woz. Microprocessors made personal computers possible.
It would be more correct to state that in the 1980s microprocessors began to replace integrated circuits in mini and larger computers.
A subtle related point is that it would be even better to point out that by "integrated circuit" above the author really means discrete small-scale integrated circuit. All microprocessors are integrated circuits, but not all integrated circuits are microprocessors. Microprocessors are large-scale integrated (LSI) circuits or nowadays very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits.
> I'm confused though. Babbage came up with the blueprints for his Difference Engine in the 1820s. I know he never succeeded at actually building it, but he never really had a fair chance if you ask me. Babbage had a chance to build his difference engine. The problem was that the engineering was a lot harder than he thought it was going to be, and he was a mathematician/economist, not so much a working engineer. The…
The key issue in early computing, and the one most people miss, is how memory-limited computing was. IBM had electromechanical arithmetic working by the 1930s, and electronic arithmetic working before WWII. Programmability was still plugboards and cams, because there was nothing suitable for storing a program yet.
Take a look at the IBM 601.[1] IBM introduced this in 1931. Add, subtract, and multiply, a few registers, and programs on a plugboard. This was the first commercial programmable calculator.
But only a few registers of memory. That was the hangup. Everybody involved, especially J. Presper Eckert, who went on to work on ENIAC and UNIVAC, recognized that. All the approaches to memory required building wheels or relays or something for each digit or bit. They had arithmetic and control. If only there was some way to store lots of data...
Bulk memory suitable for program storage finally appeared with delay lines, magnetic drums, and storage CRTs. Eckert again.[2] Architecture was not the problem. Hardware was the problem. Computing needed hardware reliable enough that you could have a few thousand gates, and memory reliable enough to not drop bits. As soon as memory had been cracked, and there was somewhere to store the program, stored program computing took off.
Memory still had a huge cost problem. Memory was a million dollars a megabyte as late as 1970. But that's another story.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I expect even searches that are not explicit, obvious LLMs like bing search to be using AI in the background.
I really don't understand your issue here. Your search is already algorithmically mediated. The algorithms are just getting better.
And all of this is of course a tangent on the original point which is that asking an LLM a related question is in _no way_ the same as having an LLM write the article.