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How can you leave out von Neumann from such a list? Also, I feel like Schmidhuber tends to be German-speaking-centric. And overall, acknowledging that this is

How can you leave out von Neumann from such a list? Also, I feel like Schmidhuber tends to be German-speaking-centric. And overall, acknowledging that this is his signature shtick and it's good to have a voice like this too, he does a lot of anachronistic reinterpretations of early discoveries in light of later results. It streamlines the story as if it was always headed towards the today, culling aspects that didn't pan out or magnifying aspects that were at the time more minor and not considered the central issue or angle.

weinzierl 5y ago
> "How can you leave out von Neumann from such a list?" When I read the title: "1931: Kurt Gödel shows limits of math, logic, computing, AI" my head automatically completed it with "John von Neumann approves." I always found it fascinating and a sign of von Neumann's greatness how quickly he not only understood the consequences of Gödel's discovery but also that he immediately and publicly accepted them.
- ProfHewitt 5y ago
  It is particularly ironic that Gödel deceived von Neumann about having already developed an important proof for [Gödel 1931]. The deception was discovered years after both had died. See [von Plato 2018]
  - bumbledraven 5y ago
    von Plato, "In Search of the Sources of Incompleteness", Proc. Int. Cong. of Math, Vol. 4 (2018) (https://eta.impa.br/dl/209.pdf https://eta.impa.br/dl/209.pdf), p 4087: > A shadow is cast on Gödel’s great achievement; there is no way of undoing the fact that Gödel played a well-planned trick to persuade von Neumann not to publish.
- P-NP 5y ago
  Von Neumann is actually mentioned 3 times in the text and in the references.
osullivj 5y ago
I found it refreshing to read a non anglocentric view. Agree we must be alert for the fallacy of conceptual retrospection.
- kaba0 5y ago
  I mean, Gödel was Austrian and von Neumann Hungarian who traveled/lived a lot in many German speaking countries, so I don’t see the anglocentrism here.
h8hawk 5y ago
I feel he is actively trying to dismiss Turing / Von neumann / church contributes and attributing them to Godel and etc.
- 317070 5y ago
  That is a bit his schtick. He himself feels like he has been the victim of an anglo-centered science history (one might debate about that), so he is retelling how the story could work if you put less focus the anglo-part. To me, it seems like a healthy coping mechanism.
  - P-NP 5y ago
    The history is well-known. Gödel started it. The "anglo-part" was mostly Church (decision problem). Turing simplified Church. At the same time, Zuse built the first real computer. I like this key part of the text: What exactly did Post[POS] and Turing[TUR] do in 1936 that hadn't been done earlier by Gödel[GOD][GOD34] (1931-34) and Church[CHU] (1935)? There is a seemingly minor difference whose significance emerged only later. Many of Gödel's instruction sequences were series of multiplications of number-coded storage contents by integers. Gödel did not care that the computational complexity of such multiplications tends to increase with storage size. Similarly, Church also ignored the spatio-temporal complexity of the basic instructions in his algorithms. Turing and Post, however, adopted a traditional, reductionist, minimalist, binary view of computing—just like Konrad Zuse (1936).[ZU36] Their machine models permitted only very simple elementary instructions with constant complexity, like the early binary machine model of Leibniz (1679).[L79][LA14][HO66] Emil Post They did not exploit this back then—for example, in 1936, Turing used his (quite inefficient) model only to rephrase the results of Gödel and Church on the limits of computability. Later, however, the simplicity of these machines made them a convenient tool for theoretical studies of complexity.
inigojonesguy 5y ago
Schonfinkel (1920)
mefaso 5y ago
Von Neumann is also german-speaking by the way
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  Spoke German among many other foreign languages, but his native language was Hungarian.
P-NP 5y ago
I see that von Neumann is actually mentioned 3 times in the text and in the references.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> Also, I feel like Schmidhuber tends to be German-speaking-centric. More to the point, he has (easy) access to original work because it's written in German.
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  Right, I wonder how much we are, globally speaking, becoming very Anglo-centric in our understanding of history, merely because we use the English language for international communication and therefore it's easier to consume histories and writings produced by Anglos.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
    Maybe not that much. At my British university (Imperial) the majority of the students at the very least don't look "Anglo" and don't have Anglo names. When I started my PhD I was greeted with an email with the names of all other PhDs starting at the same year, cc'd. So I saw everyone's names (in Office 360- you can see the names attached to the email addresses) and I think there were two or three recognisably Anglosaxon names in about 80 names. So I suspect it's more that English is used as a lingua franca for students and researchers from all over the world, than that students and researchers are predominantly native English speakers. Myself, for example, am not a native English speaker :)

weinzierl 5y ago

> "How can you leave out von Neumann from such a list?" When I read the title: "1931: Kurt Gödel shows limits of math, logic, computing, AI" my head automatically completed it with "John von Neumann approves." I always found it fascinating and a sign of von Neumann's greatness how quickly he not only understood the consequences of Gödel's discovery but also that he immediately and publicly accepted them.

ProfHewitt 5y ago
It is particularly ironic that Gödel deceived von Neumann about having already developed an important proof for [Gödel 1931]. The deception was discovered years after both had died. See [von Plato 2018]
- bumbledraven 5y ago
  von Plato, "In Search of the Sources of Incompleteness", Proc. Int. Cong. of Math, Vol. 4 (2018) (https://eta.impa.br/dl/209.pdf https://eta.impa.br/dl/209.pdf), p 4087: > A shadow is cast on Gödel’s great achievement; there is no way of undoing the fact that Gödel played a well-planned trick to persuade von Neumann not to publish.
P-NP 5y ago
Von Neumann is actually mentioned 3 times in the text and in the references.

osullivj 5y ago

I found it refreshing to read a non anglocentric view. Agree we must be alert for the fallacy of conceptual retrospection.

kaba0 5y ago
I mean, Gödel was Austrian and von Neumann Hungarian who traveled/lived a lot in many German speaking countries, so I don’t see the anglocentrism here.

h8hawk 5y ago

I feel he is actively trying to dismiss Turing / Von neumann / church contributes and attributing them to Godel and etc.

317070 5y ago
That is a bit his schtick. He himself feels like he has been the victim of an anglo-centered science history (one might debate about that), so he is retelling how the story could work if you put less focus the anglo-part. To me, it seems like a healthy coping mechanism.
- P-NP 5y ago
  The history is well-known. Gödel started it. The "anglo-part" was mostly Church (decision problem). Turing simplified Church. At the same time, Zuse built the first real computer. I like this key part of the text: What exactly did Post[POS] and Turing[TUR] do in 1936 that hadn't been done earlier by Gödel[GOD][GOD34] (1931-34) and Church[CHU] (1935)? There is a seemingly minor difference whose significance emerged only later. Many of Gödel's instruction sequences were series of multiplications of number-coded storage contents by integers. Gödel did not care that the computational complexity of such multiplications tends to increase with storage size. Similarly, Church also ignored the spatio-temporal complexity of the basic instructions in his algorithms. Turing and Post, however, adopted a traditional, reductionist, minimalist, binary view of computing—just like Konrad Zuse (1936).[ZU36] Their machine models permitted only very simple elementary instructions with constant complexity, like the early binary machine model of Leibniz (1679).[L79][LA14][HO66] Emil Post They did not exploit this back then—for example, in 1936, Turing used his (quite inefficient) model only to rephrase the results of Gödel and Church on the limits of computability. Later, however, the simplicity of these machines made them a convenient tool for theoretical studies of complexity.

inigojonesguy 5y ago

Schonfinkel (1920)

mefaso 5y ago

Von Neumann is also german-speaking by the way

bonoboTP 5y ago
Spoke German among many other foreign languages, but his native language was Hungarian.

P-NP 5y ago

I see that von Neumann is actually mentioned 3 times in the text and in the references.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

>> Also, I feel like Schmidhuber tends to be German-speaking-centric. More to the point, he has (easy) access to original work because it's written in German.

bonoboTP 5y ago
Right, I wonder how much we are, globally speaking, becoming very Anglo-centric in our understanding of history, merely because we use the English language for international communication and therefore it's easier to consume histories and writings produced by Anglos.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  Maybe not that much. At my British university (Imperial) the majority of the students at the very least don't look "Anglo" and don't have Anglo names. When I started my PhD I was greeted with an email with the names of all other PhDs starting at the same year, cc'd. So I saw everyone's names (in Office 360- you can see the names attached to the email addresses) and I think there were two or three recognisably Anglosaxon names in about 80 names. So I suspect it's more that English is used as a lingua franca for students and researchers from all over the world, than that students and researchers are predominantly native English speakers. Myself, for example, am not a native English speaker :)