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Danny Hillis: "The first time I met Marvin Minsky: I walked into his office, I was very intimidated. He was sitting there, he was throwing wadded up pieces of
by EdwardCoffin 11y ago
Danny Hillis: "The first time I met Marvin Minsky: I walked into his office, I was
very intimidated. He was sitting there, he was throwing wadded up
pieces of paper at a wastebasket across the room, and doing a terrible
job of it. He's missing it, they're all falling short. So I watch
this for a while. Then he looked up at me and said 'ah! I forgot! It's one half em
gee squared!'"
- From his talk On Game Software Development, in 2001 I think (from Technetcast.com)
- josteink 11y agoMaybe I'm wrong, but that sounds like he was trying to get the formula for kinetic energy, which would be half em vee squared. Just to be clear: I'm not questioning the story, just the details in the recollection :)
- EdwardCoffin 11y agoI did wonder at the discrepancy at the time, so I re-listened to the audio several times carefully when I was writing the transcript above. To me, he is clearly saying gee rather than vee (could be an artifact of the recording though). I'm sure Hillis knows more physics than I do (though I knew the equations of motion pretty well at one time), but he could easily have just mis-spoke. I didn't pursue this line of thought, but considered it might have been something to do with him deriving an expression for the vertical position in a gravitational field, perhaps in terms of horizontal motion or something.