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The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines (1995)

66 points by lispython 13y ago

skorgu 13y ago
"Hillis envisioned his machine eventually becoming a sort of public-intelligence utility into which people would tap their home PCs, thereby bringing artificial intelligence to the world." Jesus can you imagine AT&T as an AI? Shudder.
- IvyMike 13y ago
  Isn't that a description of Google?
  - greenyoda 13y ago
    Not really, since Google doesn't do anything related to AI (OK, maybe self-driving cars, but that's not part of their public internet services). IBM's Watson might turn into a public AI utility, however.
    - IvyMike 13y ago
      I once typed "That thing where a boat is replaced one part at a time" and Google came back with the right answer. If that's not AI I have no idea what is. (And if you don't think that Hillis envisioned his AI doing things like "answers random questions" and "translating between human languages", what do you think he had in mind?)
      - greenyoda 13y ago
        My guess is that Google's search algorithm has no idea what a "boat" is, and that it just has some clever algorithm that matched your query against some words in one of its indexed documents. That doesn't sound like it would qualify as AI. An AI program would have some kind of knowledge representation[1] and inference engine that would allow it to reason about boats. If your query was "that thing where a boat gives birth to a tree", it could tell you your query didn't make sense, as opposed to just returning nothing relevant. By the way, when I tried my nonsensical query on Google, the first result was about a Syrian woman giving birth on a boat. So Google doesn't even understand the basics of grammar, let alone that a boat is an inanimate object that can't give birth to anything. That doesn't sound like "intelligence" to me. There were AI programs in the 1980s that could do better than that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
        tensor 13y ago
        Given that we don't know how google search currently works, that's some serious speculation on your part. We've made quite some progress since the 80s. For example, neural word embeddings learn which words are synonyms without any input (and google recently release a faster algorithm for doing this called word2vec). There are algorithms for parsing sentences, and numerous databases and ontologies representing manually curated 'concepts'. Google could well be using some of these within it's search. That it doesn't come back and say "that doesn't make sense" might only be because the search is designed to always try to find something, even if it's the wrong thing. That's because it's posed as a ranking problem. In any case, what is intelligence? One of my favourite sayings on this topic is this (and I forget who to attribute this to, but it's not mine): "We will never have artificial intelligent. Every so often we come up with a problem to test for intelligence. When a computer finally beats a human at this problem, detractors are quick to backtrack and claim 'well that's not really intelligence' and proceed to come up with a new test for intelligence." I suspect that this will likely go on for a very long time. In the meantime, we've been using intelligent algorithms for decades already.
      - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
        "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      Google uses a lot of AI for their search engine, their ad targeting, their automated translation service, voice recognition, reverse image search, Google Now, and probably a 100 other things that I don't know about. They are almost a machine learning company.
sokoloff 13y ago
Thanks for posting. Really enjoyed the historical read... I wish I'd known the backstory of the antique fire engine that I'd periodically see driving around the Lechmere area (back when Lechmere was still "a thing" :) )
kken 13y ago
>Hillis is what good scientists call a very bright guy -- creative, imaginative, but not quite a genius. What an odd classification.
- ScottBurson 13y ago
  That's my assessment too. When I learned about the CM, I thought it was crazy. How could a SIMD machine work for AI? Intelligence emerges from the interaction and integration of multiple, somewhat independent "agents" -- not really the right word but I can't think of a better one. This is Marvin Minsky's own theory, to which I happen to subscribe, but even if I didn't or even if you don't, I still can't understand how Marvin got sucked into this (except that Danny was engaged to his daughter Margaret). The key point is how SIMD machines handle conditionals. The conditional "branch" is emitted, and those processors on which the test fails simply don't execute the next n instructions. This means that for a complex conditional that's rarely satisfied, only one or two processors out of the tens of thousands the machine might be built with would actually be executing. This is why you wouldn't run a compiler, for example, on a SIMD machine: most of the time, most of the machine would be idle. Anyway, I wasn't involved in TMC, though I knew people who were. Nobody asked my opinion, nor would they likely have given it much weight if they had (I'm sure there were skeptics with much better credentials than mine who also were not listened to). But I was right. As I once heard someone else comment, the CM turned out to be useful for approximately the complement of the set of problems that it was intended for. It wound up being pretty good for number crunching, at least for a while until better things emerged, but useless for AI.
  - e12e 13y ago
    > How could a SIMD machine work for AI? I guess it depends on how you define AI, from the excellent article linked above: http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine... "Part Two of Feynman's "Let's Get Organized" campaign was that we should begin a regular seminar series of invited speakers who might have interesting things to do with our machine. Richard's idea was that we should concentrate on people with new applications, because they would be less conservative about what kind of computer they would use. 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. In 1983, studying neural networks was about as fashionable as studying ESP, so some people considered John Hopfield a little bit crazy. Richard was certain he would fit right in at Thinking Machines Corporation. What Hopfield had invented was a way of constructing an [associative memory], a device for remembering patterns. To use an associative memory, one trains it on a series of patterns, such as pictures of the letters of the alphabet. Later, when the memory is shown a new pattern it is able to recall a similar pattern that it has seen in the past. A new picture of the letter "A" will "remind" the memory of another "A" that it has seen previously. Hopfield had figured out how such a memory could be built from devices that were similar to biological neurons. Not only did Hopfield's method seem to work, but it seemed to work well on the Connection Machine. Feynman figured out the details of how to use one processor to simulate each of Hopfield's neurons, with the strength of the connections represented as numbers in the processors' memory. 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." edit: This made me wonder how Moore's greenarray forth computers might be used for neural nets...
pge 13y ago
An entertaining article by Hillis about Richard Feynman's involvement in Thinking Machines: http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...
- elteto 13y ago
  You beat me to the punch, came here to post exactly this. A very entertaining story and I couldn't stop laughing when they sent Feynman to get office supplies (!!!) because they didn't quite know what to with him.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
JPKab 13y ago
The guys from Thinking Machines (at least quite a few of them) ended up starting a very weird enterprise software company called Ab Initio. They're an odd company who doesn't even get included in Gartner surveys because they won't release any information about their product. The only reason they get any business is because they participate in "bake-offs" with big companies like international banks and blow the competition (IBM, MS, Oracle, etc) away with fully scalable Proof of Concepts. I work with Ab Initio software sometimes, and its weird and annoyingly "enterprisey", but due to the parallel computing background of the guys who started Ab Initio, the software was capable of scaling up storage and processing long before anyone came up with Hadoop. Obviously its extremely closed-source stuff with a proprietary language used to configure it. I hate enterprise software companies, but Ab Initio is certainly pretty cool compared to the other ones, and the people I meet there who are old Thinking Machines guys are super brilliant and interesting. Another interesting point: the author of this article is Gary Taubes, who is the metascience guy who got big into low carb, high fat diets and the science that supports them.
- rst 13y ago
  A whole lot of TMC alumni also wound up at Sun Microsystems. These included Guy Steele, Greg Papadapoulos (for a time, Sun's CTO), John Rose (a major JVM developer), Lew Tucker (who was running their cloud computing division for a while), and a whole lot of hardware engineers who were key in a bunch of different capacities.
  - ScottBurson 13y ago
    Also, Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, is a TMC alumnus.
- i386 13y ago
  They may not be as sexy as your next Snapchat/Uber/X for Y clone but enterprise software companies really do make the world go round.
milhous 13y ago
I always loved their motto: "We're building a machine that will be proud of us."
ColinWright 13y ago
OK, now I get the complaints about https://hn.algolia.io https://hn.algolia.io that I was reading earlier. First glance it's absolutely terrible. I have no idea if it will get better if I persevere, but I've just tried searching for things that have "rise" and "thinking" in the title so I could review the discussions from the past gazzilions of times this has been posted. Nightmare. Absolute nightmare. I really, really hope they take on board the feedback they've had, because this is horrible. I hate to be so negative. Maybe it'll grow on me, although I feel seriously disinclined to make the effort. Added in edit: I can't even work out how to use the search function to find that discussion. Eurgh. Added in further edit: OK, now found it, but I'm reluctant to say anything more as my impressions are so unremittingly negative. I hope you guys have thick skins and serious programming ability to make it usable quickly. For now, there's no way I'll be using it, so the search box is now useless. Bookmarking HNSearch. Final edit: OK, I'm surprised, this has only been submitted on five previous occasions under this title. I thought it was more.
- redox_ 13y ago
  All feedback are read and welcome :) We've already deployed a few UX improvements and are currently working on improving the usability. We'll deploy it soon, preview available here: https://hn.algolia.com/beta https://hn.algolia.com/beta.
  - ihnorton 13y ago
    A couple requests: 1. sort by date. this is very useful to find discussions which have dropped off the front page but might still have interesting updates. 2. verbatim search (right now "algolia" -> "algorithm") 3. fix the fact that this thread doesn't show up when I search for "algolia" with [last 24h] checked.
    - redox_ 13y ago
      1. Sorting by date and not by points often produces ugly results (especially on long period) so we introduced the "last 24", "past week" and "past month" options filtering the resultset but keeping the default ranking. Would love to have more feedback about it, because even it's different than before, we think it fits quite well. 2. verbatim search is something we do not provide yet, I opened a feature-request our side :) 3. Have you check [All] or [Comment] instead of default [Story]? (I've just updated hn.algolia.com with last ranking/design tweaks)
f2f 13y ago
this is the fat-tree connection diagram for one of the cabinets of a CM-5. it was posted on a wall at one of the national labs in the US which had the pleasure of working with a CM-5 around the time War Games was in theatres. People still gushed about how nice that machine was to program 10-15 years later. SyCortex tried to do something similar with their computers, unfortunately they failed and with them the last interesting connector architecture... http://i.imgur.com/jHtf4QB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/jHtf4QB.jpg
smoyer 13y ago
Interesting that nCube [1] was also mentioned in the article. I remember HRB Systems (here in State College PA - and later part of E-Systems, now Raytheon) bought nCube computers that were based on the HyperCube architecture. I was at C-COR in 2005 when we purchased nCube from Larry Ellison's holding company and added their VOD servers to our product family. Now that C-COR has been merged into ARRIS, the legacy of nCube lives on in that company's VOD/IA servers [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCUBE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCUBE [2] http://www.arrisi.com/products/product.asp?id=17 http://www.arrisi.com/products/product.asp?id=17
chiph 13y ago
What were the compute cells like in the Connection Machine? The article uses the phrase "single-bit processor", but that doesn't sound all that useful - you'd want something with at least a little memory and a decent instruction set. Too small a cell and it runs out of work and spends most of it's time waiting on the network. Too big and you'll run into packaging problems.
- hga 13y ago
  From old memory (of Danny Hillis explaining it in a general seminar, etc.; if they'd had their hiring act together, I would have joined them), the key in the CM-1 is the connections. It was a SIMD machine, a single instruction at a time was transmitted to all the CPUs (one of the reasons a company had to be formed, the top notch analog EEs he had to hire to make it work had salaries higher than an MIT professor's, which just isn't done), and depending on their state they'd do something, or perhaps ignore it. How you laid out your data was key; what I remember of the example he gave, each street intersection was allocated to a CPU. There's of course much better accounts out there, but this might give you a flavor. It's entirely unlike the usual MIMD machines which they and many others built later.
  - csense 13y ago
    The wikipedia article for the Connection Machine has a link to manuals. The one I'm reading is for the CM-5, so maybe the earlier arches were different, but to me it looks an awful lot like modern GPU's. [1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/ http://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/
    - abecedarius 13y ago
      Yes, the CM-5 was very different. You want the CM-1 or 2.
- EdwardCoffin 13y ago
  Guy Steele talked briefly about this in an interview with Dr. Dobb's magazine [1]. Here's the relevant excerpt: As my leave of absence was ending, I was still involved at Carnegie Mellon and showed up for a seminar given by Danny Hillis [http://www.edge.org/digerati/hillis/ http://www.edge.org/digerati/hillis/] about the CM-1 Connection Machine [http://mission.base.com/tamiko/cm/ http://mission.base.com/tamiko/cm/]. He went on quite enthusiastically about artificial intelligence and neural networks but thought the CM-1 was less suited for numerical programming. Whenever you tell me that you can't make a computer do something, it's a red flag. I believe the Turing hypothesis. The only question is the efficiency of the calculation. I believe in crunching the numbers, doing the calculations, and finding out whether an assertion is true or not. So while Danny finished the lecture, I scribbled calculations on the back of an envelope. Okay, suppose you did the arithmetic bit serially, like the PDP-8S? A 32-bit floating-point multiply you have to multiply two 24-bit significands, that's going to take 600 time steps. For the additions, a logarithmic number of shifts, each will take 24 time steps...It turned out that a floating-point add would take about 1/2 a millisecond and a multiply a millisecond. Sounds terrible, but you've got 64,000 processors. DDJ: So you could do 64,000 of these calculations in a millisecond. GS: That's up in the range of 100 million operations a second, equivalent to a Cray 1, which was the supercomputer of the day. So after the lecture, I went up to Danny and said, "You said this is a terrible numeric machine, but I can tell it's approximately the equivalent of a Cray 1." And he replied, "Can we have dinner tonight?" [1] http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/a-conversation-with-guy-steele-jr/184406029 http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/a-conversation-with-guy-steele-jr...
hga 13y ago
From what little I saw, Sheryl Handler indeed had no business skills. My experience was trying to be the 1st or 2nd person to fill a particular job. I had a great interview process (except for Danny, a friend, initially giving me a hard time for not being in school ($$$)) ... and then nothing. So long, that it was more than a month later, when I'd accepted and started another job, that they contacted me to proceed. As I understand it (I knew practically everyone who could do this job), it took them three tries to fill it. The worse story, though, which was well sourced, was that they once contacted an applicant's current workplace to get recommendation info.... In part, I suspect they're another example of "Death by Lethal Reputation" in hiring: http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/halethalrep.htm http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/halethalrep.htm
look_lookatme 13y ago
Anyone have a clear video of the CM-2 LEDs in action? Can't seem to find anything on Youtube. It is a beautiful piece of hardware: http://www.mission-base.com/tamiko/cm/CM-1_500w.gif http://www.mission-base.com/tamiko/cm/CM-1_500w.gif While search I found this awesome post about someone rescuing a panel from a CM-5: http://www.alternet.us.com/?p=1272 http://www.alternet.us.com/?p=1272
- markc 13y ago
  If you're ever near Maryland head over to the National Cryptologic Museum where you can see a CM-5 still running. I just saw it a couple days ago.
badsock 13y ago
I'm conflicted about Hillis. On one hand there's stuff like this, and especially his involvement with the Long Now foundation (if you haven't checked out his design for the 10,000 year clock, you really should; clever solutions to engineering challenges that almost no one has ever thought about before): http://longnow.org/clock/ http://longnow.org/clock/ On the other hand he's part of Intellectual Ventures: http://www.intellectualventures.com/inventor-network/senior-inventors/w.-daniel-hillis http://www.intellectualventures.com/inventor-network/senior-...
caycep 13y ago
How successful are the "neuromorphic chips" (or even GPU's) in doing what TM tried to do?
juliendorra 13y ago
When I was a teenager, back in 1993, I played with this this genetic image generator by Karl Sims, running on a Connection Machine with 32768 processor: http://www.karlsims.com/genetic-images.html http://www.karlsims.com/genetic-images.html (At the Pompidou Center, a contemporary art museum). It obviously blew my young mind, with the 16 screens, the ability to select an image as the seed for the new series, the endless playability and the vertigo of not being able to ever go back and find any series again. I don't know if a Cray would have been less or more suited to that kind of interactive installation. But it surely was a incredible feat for the time.

66 points by lispython 13y ago

"Hillis envisioned his machine eventually becoming a sort of public-intelligence utility into which people would tap their home PCs, thereby bringing artificial intelligence to the world." Jesus can you imagine AT&T as an AI? Shudder.

IvyMike 13y ago
Isn't that a description of Google?
- greenyoda 13y ago
  Not really, since Google doesn't do anything related to AI (OK, maybe self-driving cars, but that's not part of their public internet services). IBM's Watson might turn into a public AI utility, however.
  - IvyMike 13y ago
    I once typed "That thing where a boat is replaced one part at a time" and Google came back with the right answer. If that's not AI I have no idea what is. (And if you don't think that Hillis envisioned his AI doing things like "answers random questions" and "translating between human languages", what do you think he had in mind?)
    - greenyoda 13y ago
      My guess is that Google's search algorithm has no idea what a "boat" is, and that it just has some clever algorithm that matched your query against some words in one of its indexed documents. That doesn't sound like it would qualify as AI. An AI program would have some kind of knowledge representation[1] and inference engine that would allow it to reason about boats. If your query was "that thing where a boat gives birth to a tree", it could tell you your query didn't make sense, as opposed to just returning nothing relevant. By the way, when I tried my nonsensical query on Google, the first result was about a Syrian woman giving birth on a boat. So Google doesn't even understand the basics of grammar, let alone that a boat is an inanimate object that can't give birth to anything. That doesn't sound like "intelligence" to me. There were AI programs in the 1980s that could do better than that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
      - tensor 13y ago
        Given that we don't know how google search currently works, that's some serious speculation on your part. We've made quite some progress since the 80s. For example, neural word embeddings learn which words are synonyms without any input (and google recently release a faster algorithm for doing this called word2vec). There are algorithms for parsing sentences, and numerous databases and ontologies representing manually curated 'concepts'. Google could well be using some of these within it's search. That it doesn't come back and say "that doesn't make sense" might only be because the search is designed to always try to find something, even if it's the wrong thing. That's because it's posed as a ranking problem. In any case, what is intelligence? One of my favourite sayings on this topic is this (and I forget who to attribute this to, but it's not mine): "We will never have artificial intelligent. Every so often we come up with a problem to test for intelligence. When a computer finally beats a human at this problem, detractors are quick to backtrack and claim 'well that's not really intelligence' and proceed to come up with a new test for intelligence." I suspect that this will likely go on for a very long time. In the meantime, we've been using intelligent algorithms for decades already.
    - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
      "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Google uses a lot of AI for their search engine, their ad targeting, their automated translation service, voice recognition, reverse image search, Google Now, and probably a 100 other things that I don't know about. They are almost a machine learning company.

sokoloff 13y ago

Thanks for posting. Really enjoyed the historical read... I wish I'd known the backstory of the antique fire engine that I'd periodically see driving around the Lechmere area (back when Lechmere was still "a thing" :) )

kken 13y ago

>Hillis is what good scientists call a very bright guy -- creative, imaginative, but not quite a genius. What an odd classification.

ScottBurson 13y ago
That's my assessment too. When I learned about the CM, I thought it was crazy. How could a SIMD machine work for AI? Intelligence emerges from the interaction and integration of multiple, somewhat independent "agents" -- not really the right word but I can't think of a better one. This is Marvin Minsky's own theory, to which I happen to subscribe, but even if I didn't or even if you don't, I still can't understand how Marvin got sucked into this (except that Danny was engaged to his daughter Margaret). The key point is how SIMD machines handle conditionals. The conditional "branch" is emitted, and those processors on which the test fails simply don't execute the next n instructions. This means that for a complex conditional that's rarely satisfied, only one or two processors out of the tens of thousands the machine might be built with would actually be executing. This is why you wouldn't run a compiler, for example, on a SIMD machine: most of the time, most of the machine would be idle. Anyway, I wasn't involved in TMC, though I knew people who were. Nobody asked my opinion, nor would they likely have given it much weight if they had (I'm sure there were skeptics with much better credentials than mine who also were not listened to). But I was right. As I once heard someone else comment, the CM turned out to be useful for approximately the complement of the set of problems that it was intended for. It wound up being pretty good for number crunching, at least for a while until better things emerged, but useless for AI.
- e12e 13y ago
  > How could a SIMD machine work for AI? I guess it depends on how you define AI, from the excellent article linked above: http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine... "Part Two of Feynman's "Let's Get Organized" campaign was that we should begin a regular seminar series of invited speakers who might have interesting things to do with our machine. Richard's idea was that we should concentrate on people with new applications, because they would be less conservative about what kind of computer they would use. 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. In 1983, studying neural networks was about as fashionable as studying ESP, so some people considered John Hopfield a little bit crazy. Richard was certain he would fit right in at Thinking Machines Corporation. What Hopfield had invented was a way of constructing an [associative memory], a device for remembering patterns. To use an associative memory, one trains it on a series of patterns, such as pictures of the letters of the alphabet. Later, when the memory is shown a new pattern it is able to recall a similar pattern that it has seen in the past. A new picture of the letter "A" will "remind" the memory of another "A" that it has seen previously. Hopfield had figured out how such a memory could be built from devices that were similar to biological neurons. Not only did Hopfield's method seem to work, but it seemed to work well on the Connection Machine. Feynman figured out the details of how to use one processor to simulate each of Hopfield's neurons, with the strength of the connections represented as numbers in the processors' memory. 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." edit: This made me wonder how Moore's greenarray forth computers might be used for neural nets...

pge 13y ago

An entertaining article by Hillis about Richard Feynman's involvement in Thinking Machines: http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

elteto 13y ago
You beat me to the punch, came here to post exactly this. A very entertaining story and I couldn't stop laughing when they sent Feynman to get office supplies (!!!) because they didn't quite know what to with him.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

JPKab 13y ago

The guys from Thinking Machines (at least quite a few of them) ended up starting a very weird enterprise software company called Ab Initio. They're an odd company who doesn't even get included in Gartner surveys because they won't release any information about their product. The only reason they get any business is because they participate in "bake-offs" with big companies like international banks and blow the competition (IBM, MS, Oracle, etc) away with fully scalable Proof of Concepts. I work with Ab Initio software sometimes, and its weird and annoyingly "enterprisey", but due to the parallel computing background of the guys who started Ab Initio, the software was capable of scaling up storage and processing long before anyone came up with Hadoop. Obviously its extremely closed-source stuff with a proprietary language used to configure it. I hate enterprise software companies, but Ab Initio is certainly pretty cool compared to the other ones, and the people I meet there who are old Thinking Machines guys are super brilliant and interesting. Another interesting point: the author of this article is Gary Taubes, who is the metascience guy who got big into low carb, high fat diets and the science that supports them.

rst 13y ago
A whole lot of TMC alumni also wound up at Sun Microsystems. These included Guy Steele, Greg Papadapoulos (for a time, Sun's CTO), John Rose (a major JVM developer), Lew Tucker (who was running their cloud computing division for a while), and a whole lot of hardware engineers who were key in a bunch of different capacities.
- ScottBurson 13y ago
  Also, Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, is a TMC alumnus.
i386 13y ago
They may not be as sexy as your next Snapchat/Uber/X for Y clone but enterprise software companies really do make the world go round.

milhous 13y ago

I always loved their motto: "We're building a machine that will be proud of us."

ColinWright 13y ago

OK, now I get the complaints about https://hn.algolia.io https://hn.algolia.io that I was reading earlier. First glance it's absolutely terrible. I have no idea if it will get better if I persevere, but I've just tried searching for things that have "rise" and "thinking" in the title so I could review the discussions from the past gazzilions of times this has been posted. Nightmare. Absolute nightmare. I really, really hope they take on board the feedback they've had, because this is horrible. I hate to be so negative. Maybe it'll grow on me, although I feel seriously disinclined to make the effort. Added in edit: I can't even work out how to use the search function to find that discussion. Eurgh. Added in further edit: OK, now found it, but I'm reluctant to say anything more as my impressions are so unremittingly negative. I hope you guys have thick skins and serious programming ability to make it usable quickly. For now, there's no way I'll be using it, so the search box is now useless. Bookmarking HNSearch. Final edit: OK, I'm surprised, this has only been submitted on five previous occasions under this title. I thought it was more.

redox_ 13y ago
All feedback are read and welcome :) We've already deployed a few UX improvements and are currently working on improving the usability. We'll deploy it soon, preview available here: https://hn.algolia.com/beta https://hn.algolia.com/beta.
- ihnorton 13y ago
  A couple requests: 1. sort by date. this is very useful to find discussions which have dropped off the front page but might still have interesting updates. 2. verbatim search (right now "algolia" -> "algorithm") 3. fix the fact that this thread doesn't show up when I search for "algolia" with [last 24h] checked.
  - redox_ 13y ago
    1. Sorting by date and not by points often produces ugly results (especially on long period) so we introduced the "last 24", "past week" and "past month" options filtering the resultset but keeping the default ranking. Would love to have more feedback about it, because even it's different than before, we think it fits quite well. 2. verbatim search is something we do not provide yet, I opened a feature-request our side :) 3. Have you check [All] or [Comment] instead of default [Story]? (I've just updated hn.algolia.com with last ranking/design tweaks)

f2f 13y ago

this is the fat-tree connection diagram for one of the cabinets of a CM-5. it was posted on a wall at one of the national labs in the US which had the pleasure of working with a CM-5 around the time War Games was in theatres. People still gushed about how nice that machine was to program 10-15 years later. SyCortex tried to do something similar with their computers, unfortunately they failed and with them the last interesting connector architecture... http://i.imgur.com/jHtf4QB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/jHtf4QB.jpg

smoyer 13y ago

Interesting that nCube [1] was also mentioned in the article. I remember HRB Systems (here in State College PA - and later part of E-Systems, now Raytheon) bought nCube computers that were based on the HyperCube architecture. I was at C-COR in 2005 when we purchased nCube from Larry Ellison's holding company and added their VOD servers to our product family. Now that C-COR has been merged into ARRIS, the legacy of nCube lives on in that company's VOD/IA servers [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCUBE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCUBE [2] http://www.arrisi.com/products/product.asp?id=17 http://www.arrisi.com/products/product.asp?id=17

chiph 13y ago

What were the compute cells like in the Connection Machine? The article uses the phrase "single-bit processor", but that doesn't sound all that useful - you'd want something with at least a little memory and a decent instruction set. Too small a cell and it runs out of work and spends most of it's time waiting on the network. Too big and you'll run into packaging problems.

hga 13y ago
From old memory (of Danny Hillis explaining it in a general seminar, etc.; if they'd had their hiring act together, I would have joined them), the key in the CM-1 is the connections. It was a SIMD machine, a single instruction at a time was transmitted to all the CPUs (one of the reasons a company had to be formed, the top notch analog EEs he had to hire to make it work had salaries higher than an MIT professor's, which just isn't done), and depending on their state they'd do something, or perhaps ignore it. How you laid out your data was key; what I remember of the example he gave, each street intersection was allocated to a CPU. There's of course much better accounts out there, but this might give you a flavor. It's entirely unlike the usual MIMD machines which they and many others built later.
- csense 13y ago
  The wikipedia article for the Connection Machine has a link to manuals. The one I'm reading is for the CM-5, so maybe the earlier arches were different, but to me it looks an awful lot like modern GPU's. [1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/ http://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/
  - abecedarius 13y ago
    Yes, the CM-5 was very different. You want the CM-1 or 2.
EdwardCoffin 13y ago
Guy Steele talked briefly about this in an interview with Dr. Dobb's magazine [1]. Here's the relevant excerpt: As my leave of absence was ending, I was still involved at Carnegie Mellon and showed up for a seminar given by Danny Hillis [http://www.edge.org/digerati/hillis/ http://www.edge.org/digerati/hillis/] about the CM-1 Connection Machine [http://mission.base.com/tamiko/cm/ http://mission.base.com/tamiko/cm/]. He went on quite enthusiastically about artificial intelligence and neural networks but thought the CM-1 was less suited for numerical programming. Whenever you tell me that you can't make a computer do something, it's a red flag. I believe the Turing hypothesis. The only question is the efficiency of the calculation. I believe in crunching the numbers, doing the calculations, and finding out whether an assertion is true or not. So while Danny finished the lecture, I scribbled calculations on the back of an envelope. Okay, suppose you did the arithmetic bit serially, like the PDP-8S? A 32-bit floating-point multiply you have to multiply two 24-bit significands, that's going to take 600 time steps. For the additions, a logarithmic number of shifts, each will take 24 time steps...It turned out that a floating-point add would take about 1/2 a millisecond and a multiply a millisecond. Sounds terrible, but you've got 64,000 processors. DDJ: So you could do 64,000 of these calculations in a millisecond. GS: That's up in the range of 100 million operations a second, equivalent to a Cray 1, which was the supercomputer of the day. So after the lecture, I went up to Danny and said, "You said this is a terrible numeric machine, but I can tell it's approximately the equivalent of a Cray 1." And he replied, "Can we have dinner tonight?" [1] http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/a-conversation-with-guy-steele-jr/184406029 http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/a-conversation-with-guy-steele-jr...

hga 13y ago

From what little I saw, Sheryl Handler indeed had no business skills. My experience was trying to be the 1st or 2nd person to fill a particular job. I had a great interview process (except for Danny, a friend, initially giving me a hard time for not being in school ($$$)) ... and then nothing. So long, that it was more than a month later, when I'd accepted and started another job, that they contacted me to proceed. As I understand it (I knew practically everyone who could do this job), it took them three tries to fill it. The worse story, though, which was well sourced, was that they once contacted an applicant's current workplace to get recommendation info.... In part, I suspect they're another example of "Death by Lethal Reputation" in hiring: http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/halethalrep.htm http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/halethalrep.htm

look_lookatme 13y ago

Anyone have a clear video of the CM-2 LEDs in action? Can't seem to find anything on Youtube. It is a beautiful piece of hardware: http://www.mission-base.com/tamiko/cm/CM-1_500w.gif http://www.mission-base.com/tamiko/cm/CM-1_500w.gif While search I found this awesome post about someone rescuing a panel from a CM-5: http://www.alternet.us.com/?p=1272 http://www.alternet.us.com/?p=1272

markc 13y ago
If you're ever near Maryland head over to the National Cryptologic Museum where you can see a CM-5 still running. I just saw it a couple days ago.

badsock 13y ago

I'm conflicted about Hillis. On one hand there's stuff like this, and especially his involvement with the Long Now foundation (if you haven't checked out his design for the 10,000 year clock, you really should; clever solutions to engineering challenges that almost no one has ever thought about before): http://longnow.org/clock/ http://longnow.org/clock/ On the other hand he's part of Intellectual Ventures: http://www.intellectualventures.com/inventor-network/senior-inventors/w.-daniel-hillis http://www.intellectualventures.com/inventor-network/senior-...

caycep 13y ago

How successful are the "neuromorphic chips" (or even GPU's) in doing what TM tried to do?

juliendorra 13y ago

When I was a teenager, back in 1993, I played with this this genetic image generator by Karl Sims, running on a Connection Machine with 32768 processor: http://www.karlsims.com/genetic-images.html http://www.karlsims.com/genetic-images.html (At the Pompidou Center, a contemporary art museum). It obviously blew my young mind, with the 16 screens, the ability to select an image as the seed for the new series, the endless playability and the vertigo of not being able to ever go back and find any series again. I don't know if a Cray would have been less or more suited to that kind of interactive installation. But it surely was a incredible feat for the time.