Etech06 day 3 George Dyson

George Dyson Turing’s Cathedral
HG Wells – world’s brain idea, 1938
Alfred Smee – invented bitmapping and postscript – if you can tell the difference between reality and thoughts, you are conscious – 1851
Turing – 1936 papers – build a universal digital machine
Liebnitz and his idea for what became shift registers
Von Neumann – actually building computers
March, 1946 – the first progress report on the computer
Paying for electricians, office space (computer started in Godel’s office space)
And Godel contributed the key idea: addressing and storing instructions in the same matrix space as the data
A cube of 5k of memory
our world is a Von Neumann matrix because Von Neumann wanted a matrix…
Barricelli’s biology papers
Von Neumann dies – The Computer and the Brain
Ulam: how are processes not just lifelike but life itself?
Meaning less and less in code and more and more in relationships between – like pageranks
? Bigelow
More and more recently, software is “floating in the computational soup” – doesn’t replace Von Neumann but floats on top – more like biology
Irving Good, 1958
Ashby, design for a brain (which is looks a lot like Google)
Nathaniel Hawthorne:
search engines are a way that computers are searching us