Feynman worked out the program for computing Hopfield's network on the Connection Machine in some detail. He pretended not to like working on any problem that was outside his claimed area of expertise. So why were people always asking him for it? "Don't bug me. Thinking Machines also introduced an early commercial redundant array of independent disks (RAID) 2 disk array, the DataVault, circa 1988.[3]. Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company,[1] founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product named the Connection Machine. Box 25, Folder 16. Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine. Most of the team that built Darwin had already left for Dun & Bradstreet soon after Thinking Machines Corporation entered bankruptcy in 1994. Lex Clips This is a Q&A excerpt on the topic of AI from a lecture by Richard Feynman from September 26th, 1985. Thinking Machines. One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. Feynman Calculus Notebook. Watching the movie got all of us, especially Feynman, excited about physical simulation. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. Richard volunteered to help out. One of the simplest problems is just making the physics so that things look the same in every direction. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to the MIT AI Lab. In this way he worked on problems in database searches, geophysical modeling, protein folding, analyzing images, and reading insurance forms. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. He was never afraid of telling the truth, and however foolish your question was, he never made you feel like a fool. Because even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. "We've got to get these guys organized," he told me. OK, boss, what's my assignment?" The notion is that the "continuum" might, at its lowest levels, be discrete in both space and time, and that the laws of physics might simply be a macro-consequence of the average behavior of tiny cells. The fossil record shows some evidence that real biological evolution might also exhibit such "punctuated equilibrium," so Richard and I decided to look more closely at why it happened. I had written a program that simulated the evolution of populations of sexually reproducing creatures over hundreds of thousands of generations. DARPA's Connection Machines were decommissioned by 1996.[5]. Getting Richard to give advice like that was sometimes tricky. No one had thought about anything technical for several months. ISBN # 0134044592. The book was published in 1985 as Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! We decided to go ahead and make the chips with the smaller number of buffers. We all started planning additions to the hardware, such as support of floating point arithmetic that would make it possible for us to perform and display a variety of simulations in real time. Thinking Machines' primary supercomputer competitor was Cray Research. to show what they know in the way that works best for them. It's a good story, though." Il reformula entièrement la mécanique quantique à l'aide de son intégrale de chemin qui généralise le principe de moindre action de la mécanique classique et inventa les diagrammes qui portent son nom et qui sont désormais largement utilisés en théorie quantique des champs (dont l'électrodynamique quantique fait partie). Members get a snapshot view of new Long Now content with easy access to all their member benefits. ", "Yeah," he sighed, "that bugs me sometimes too. [4] The next year, they sold $65 million (USD) worth of hardware and software, making them the market leader in parallel supercomputers. and became a best-seller. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. (Hi LindaM!) I was a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Carl was one of the undergraduates helping me with my thesis project. We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard walked in, saluted, and said, "Richard Feynman reporting for duty. strategy. Feynman also took charge of the project’s primitive computing effort, using a hybrid of new calculating machines and human workers to try to process the vast amounts of numerical computation required by the project. Suddenly a grin lit up his face. Daniel Hillis,Bradley C. Kuszmaul,Margaret A. St. Pierre,David S. Wells, Monica C. Wong-Chan,Shaw-Wen Yang,and Robert Zak Thinking Machines Corporation Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 February 7, 1996 Abstract The … Feynman, Carl n.d. Feynman, Debbie 1985. Richard Phillips Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in Queens, New York City, the son of Lucille née Phillips, a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman, a sales manager, originally from Minsk in Belarus, in those days part of the Russian Empire; both were Ashkenazi Jews. Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham, Massachusetts in the late 1980s by Danny Hillis[?] Actually, I doubt that it was "progress" that most interested Richard. For Richard, that time was at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). For our first seminar he invited John Hopfield, a friend of his from CalTech, to give us a talk on his scheme for building neural networks. If the universe in fact worked this way, then it presumably would have testable consequences, such as an upper limit on the density of information per cubic meter of space. 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. Richard Feynman, circa 1962 Introduction I first heard of Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton in 1986, through their entertaining book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!Thirteen years later I met Ralph at a party.We became friends, and over the next year we worked together on the design of a fantasy stamp honoring Feynman. I also did some very cool machine vision stuff. About; Open TM; Press Room; Careers Contact we build data strategies pipelines models stories. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. Because many processors had to communicate simultaneously, many messages would contend for the same wires. Our question to Richard Feynman was whether we had allowed enough buffers for the router to operate efficiently. Published on Sunday, January 15, 01989 • 31 years, 5 months ago Written by Danny Hillis for Physics Today. I do not mean to imply that Richard was hesitant to do the "dirty work." "Hey," he said, all trace of sadness forgotten, "I bet I can show you a better way home. 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. Then he would set to work, scribbling on a pad of paper and staring at the results. So is probabilistic thinking, inversion, and entropy. As it turned out, building a big computer is a good excuse to talk to people who are working on some of the most exciting problems in science. for humans We are a data science consultancy committed to delivering quality work for our clients and our community. In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. The part that he was proudest of was the subroutine for computing logarithms. His notion was that the underlying automata, rather than being connected in a regular lattice like a grid or a pattern of hexagons, might be randomly connected. "Give me something real to do.". In 1991, DARPA and the United States Department of Energy reduced their purchases amid criticism they were unfairly favoring Thinking Machines at the expense of Cray, nCUBE, and MasPar. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company. Since all of these multiplications can take place concurrently, there is plenty of opportunity to keep all 64,000 processors busy. In the meantime, the rest of us, happy to have found something to keep Richard occupied, went about the business of ordering the furniture and computers, hiring the first engineers, and arranging for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to pay for the development of the first prototype. Gain insights to meet your students where they are. Since Feynman's equations claimed we could do this safely, his unconventional methods of analysis started looking better and better to us. US Patent: 7756873, Jul 13, 2010. Richard arrived in Boston the day after the company was incorporated. Sometimes he really would give up, but more often than not he would come back a few days after his refusal and remark, "I've been thinking about what you asked the other day and it seems to me..." This worked best if you were careful not to expect it. Fortunately, he was right. Finding the solution involves adding up the contributions of all of the possible configurations of certain matrices on the links of the lattice, or at least some large representative sample. Waves propagating through this medium would, on the average, propagate at the same rate in every direction. They were not religious, and by his youth Feynman described himself as an "avowed atheist". The machine, as we envisioned it, would contain a million tiny computers, all connected by a communications network. When several years later I wrote a general interest article on the Connection Machine for [Scientific American], he was disappointed that it left out too many details. Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. He is the son of physicist Richard P. Feynman, and the brother of Michelle Feynman. The CM-1 through CM-200 were examples of single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) architecture, while the later CM-5 and CM-5E were multiple instruction, multiple data (MIMD) that combined commodity SPARC processors and proprietary vector processors in a fat tree computer network. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this, "We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. Feynman also took charge of the project’s primitive computing effort, using a hybrid of new calculating machines and human workers to try to process the vast amounts of numerical computation required by the project. In practice, such a computation requires so much arithmetic that it could keep the fastest computers in the world busy for years. He was the father of Carl Feynman and adoptive father of Michelle Feynman. Yay! He asked questions until he reduced the problem to some essential puzzle that he thought he would be able to solve. Because of the parallel nature of Hopfield's algorithm, all of the processors could be used concurrently with 100\% efficiency, so the Connection Machine would be hundreds of times faster than any conventional computer. Or, "Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Today 42(2), 78 (1989). He always started by asking very basic questions like, "What is the simplest example?" Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated. I could never figure out just what his department was, but it did not matter anyway, since he spent most of his time working on those "not-my-department" problems. see how we do it. To use an associative memory, one trains it on a series of patterns, such as pictures of the letters of the alphabet. The results were surprising in that the fitness of the population made progress in sudden leaps rather than by the expected steady improvement. Each cell could be a simple automaton that obeys a small set of rules and communicates only with its nearest neighbors, like the lattice calculation for QCD. Besides Hillis, other noted people who worked for or with the company included Robert Millstein, Greg Papadopoulos, David Waltz, Guy L Steele, Jr., Karl Sims, Brewster Kahle, Bradley Kuszmaul, Carl Feynman, Cliff Lasser, Marvin Denicoff, Alex Vasilevsky, Allan Torres, Richard Fishman, Mirza Mehdi, Alan Harshman, Richard Jordan, Alan Mercer, James Bailey, Tsutomu Shimomura. ", I hesitated. Thinking Machines alumni (known as "Thunkos") helped create several parallel computing software start-ups, including Ab Initio Software; and Applied Parallel Technologies, which was later renamed Torrent Systems and acquired by Ascential Software, which was in turn acquired by IBM. The algorithm fit especially well on the Connection Machine, since the small table of the logarithms of $1 + 2^{-k]$ could be shared by all the processors. Among the early corporate fellows of Thinking Machines were Marvin Minsky, Doug Lenat, Stephen Wolfram, Tomaso Poggio, Richard Feynman, and Jack Schwartz later joined by Charles E. Leiserson, Alan Edelman and Eric Lander, Lennart Johnsson." It became profitable in 1989, in part because of its contracts from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In the 1980s, working with Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), he recorded chapters on audio tape that Ralph transcribed. And whatever he understood, he could make others understand as well. This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. Quantum chromodynamics is a theory of the internal workings of atomic particles such as protons. I, MARCH 1993 Infinitesimal Machinery Richard Feynman Editor’s Preface-This speech, delivered in 1983, is a sequel to the famous 1960 speech “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” That was the essence of Richard's charm. "I'm sad because you're going to die. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman. Now I don't have to explain to people that I work with a bunch of loonies. Discover Creative Tools . He invented it at Los Alamos. he said. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Not a formal dinner, certainly; this was a barbeque in the summer of '85 or '86 in Cambridge, at a house shared by his son Carl and some other folks who worked at Thinking Machines and Symbolics at the time. But not so much as you think." The machine, as we envisioned it, would include a million tiny computers, all connected by a communications network. ... Assignee: Thinking Machines Corporation Hopfield had figured out how such a memory could be built from devices that were similar to biological neurons. Il développa aussi les diagrammes de Feynman, un outil qui permet de conceptualiser et de faciliter le calcul des interactions entre particules dans l'espace-temps, notammen… We called it a "Connection Machine." Often, at Thinking Machines when he was asked for advice he would gruffly refuse with "That's not my department." From that point on, Richard pushed us more and more toward looking at numerical applications of the machine. Instead, we planned to connect the processors in a 20-dimensional hypercube so that each processor would only need to talk to 20 others directly. Deformable models can be computed efficiently in parallel. He was born on May 11, 1918, in … Copyright 1989, American Institute of Physics. Concentrating on the algorithm for a basic arithmetic operation was typical of Richard's approach. Published monthly, the member newsletter gives in-depth and behind the scenes updates on Long Now's projects. or "How can you tell if the answer is right?" Reprinted with permission from Phys. I spent the first half of the '90s sending way to much email to the Extropians list. Specifically, we could use one processor to simulate each cell and rules that were chosen to model something useful, like fluid dynamics. Using this approach, Richard decided we should pick an expert in each area of importance in the machine, such as software or packaging or electronics, to become the "group leader" in this area, analogous to the group leaders at Los Alamos. He would later scoff at psychometric testing. There he was instrumental in setting up some of the first plug-programmable tabulating machines for physical simulation. Unlock creative thinking for all students in any subject. Both of these were "known" to be requirements for number-crunching. Feynman decided to test this assumption on a problem that he was familiar with in detail: quantum chromodynamics. Thinking Machines continued as a pure data mining company until it was acquired in 1999 by Oracle Corporation. Richard Feynman gained his reputation and became well-known for being capable of explaining complex elements in theoretical physics easily and understandably. One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. We started working with physicists, astronomers, geologists, biologists, chemists --- everyone of them trying to solve some problem that it had never been possible to solve before. He asked, "How is anyone supposed to know that this isn't just a bunch of crap?". Thus, even while still in high school, he was developing the mathematical intuition behind his Taylor series of mathematical o… Feynman was always quick to point out to them that he considered their specific models "kooky," but like the Connection Machine, he considered the subject sufficiently crazy to put some energy into. The first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life. I mention it here not only because it is a clever algorithm, but also because it is a specific contribution Richard made to the mainstream of computer science.

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