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Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine (1989)
- omegant 13y agoAmazing!, very good Feynman story that I didn't know. I love how Feynman accepted those challenging problems.
- zix 13y agoI never can get enough stories about Richard Feynman. I thought I'd heard them all, but somehow I missed this one. It's well written and captures many of the things he worked on later in his life; not to mention it's a really cool article about the beginnings of a rather ambitious project to make a parallel computer in the early 1980s.
- danh 13y agoFavorite part: "Since the only computer language Richard was really familiar with was Basic, he made up a parallel version of Basic in which he wrote the program and then simulated it by hand to estimate how fast it would run on the Connection Machine."
- AceJohnny2 13y agoI would've hoped someone of Feynman's level would've easily picked up a better language.
- gliese1337 13y agoSomeone like Feynman is capable of inventing a new language for parallel computing and correctly simulating its execution by hand. That's a much more impressive skill than just learning another language.
- AceJohnny2 13y agoI don't think so. He didn't invent a new language, but extended an existing one. And I simulate what a program does in my head all the time when debugging (including multithreaded stuff, but I agree that's hard).
- anywhichway 13y agoFeynman may have found the arbitrary nature of syntax for a new language a tedious learning exercise.
- jpdoctor 13y agoThis article was from the Physics Today memorial issue on Feynman iirc. When I read it at the time, I seem to remember that it was also the weakest article in that issue. (It was before Thinking Machines crashed and burned.)
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- mrdmnd 13y agoI took Alan Edelman's 18.337 class (Parallel Supercomputing) at MIT a few years ago, and on the first day he brought in some boards that had been used in the original Connection Machine - it was like looking into a piece of living history to see circuits that had been influenced by Feynman. Fantastic article!
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- ca98am79 13y agopreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191212
- thebadplus 13y ago"""So why were people always asking him for it? Because even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us.""" What a gift of a human.