[HN Gopher] How Claude Shannon helped kick-start machine learning
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How Claude Shannon helped kick-start machine learning
Author : pseudolus
Score : 124 points
Date : 2022-01-26 11:19 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| nicholast wrote:
| He was also a jazz musician (the clarinet), a somewhat
| accomplished juggler, a devoted unicycle enthusiast, and left
| behind a basement full of contraptions he was building in various
| states of finish - like the electronic mouse navigating a maze, a
| chess playing machine, and all other kinds of curiosities. His
| papers are coherent and still relevant to this day and follow the
| birth of each of these fields like information theory and
| artificial intelligence. Who knows what else he might have been
| working on at Bell labs that we may not be privy too.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| Not explicitly mentioned in TFA is that Shannon was the first
| to apply the Minimax algorithm [1] for computer chess. The
| Minimax algorithm, later streamlined to include alpha-beta
| pruning, has been a key component in AI game playing machines
| ever since.
|
| [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax [2].
| https://stanford.edu/~cpiech/cs221/apps/deepBlue.html
|
| I've posted this before, a compiled list of the machines and
| gadgets Claude Shannon built to experiment with simple AI ideas
| to play games [3]. Apologies for the repeat:
|
| [3]. https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon-
| man...
| vernie wrote:
| Damn, I was happier not knowing about the juggling and unicycle
| stuff.
| jacobriis wrote:
| "His papers are coherent"
|
| High praise for one of the greatest minds of his generation
| melissalobos wrote:
| It actually is, most papers written today are cut and paste
| jobs with multiple people writing one section. The quality
| and focus from one paragraph to another can change. I think
| the lack of computers helped a bit as well for the quality of
| earlier papers. There used to be a lot of effort needed to
| publish a single paper since computers couldn't do
| typesetting.
|
| Aside from that he has what comes off as a very clear mind.
| If you haven't I would highly recommend reading his papers.
| Coherent is a good adjective to describe his work.
| thewarrior wrote:
| They are easy to understand even for average people.
| sasvari wrote:
| Interesting episode from Tim Harford's Cautionary Tales podcast
| about Claude Shannon and his various other interests:
|
| https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/fritterin-away-genius/
| nicholast wrote:
| BS
| hegzploit wrote:
| Jon vom Neumann also comes to mind when thinking about brilliant
| people from the past century.
| pseudolus wrote:
| There's a new bio of von Neumann "The Man from the Future: The
| Visionary Life of John von Neumann" coming out in February in
| the US. [0] If you're impatient you can order a copy from
| Amazon's UK site where it's been available since October.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Man-Future-Visionary-Life-
| Neumann/dp/...
| pixelpoet wrote:
| > Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe could not comprehend von Neumann's
| incredible intellect: "I have sometimes wondered whether a
| brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior
| to that of man."
|
| There are plenty of smart humans, but John von Neumann was
| something else entirely. Like the author of the article
| concludes about Shannon, I wonder if we will ever see another
| "human" mind like that again.
| JackFr wrote:
| >There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great
| things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do
| the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are
| magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman
| was a magician. --Hans Bethe
|
| Seems like Bethe hung out with some elevated company.
| MR4D wrote:
| Backyard BBQ's and cocktail parties must have been
| phenomenal. Just to be a fly on the wall. Wow.
| bluetwo wrote:
| I was chatting about him with a friend and pointing out all the
| things in the room influenced by him. Of course he led a pretty
| normal life, so no one is going to make a "Beautiful Mind" type
| movie about him. Other than playing his record player too loud
| in his office and having wild martini happy hours with his wife
| and friends, I can't find anything controversial about him.
| AQuantized wrote:
| Driving around while reading the newspaper and getting into
| frequent crashes, and advocating for the immediate nuclear
| annihilation of Russia, are at least 2 other controversial
| pastimes.
| Kalanos wrote:
| algorithms are just a condensed logical representation of
| information. that's why i associate him w the field
| sharmin123 wrote:
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| You have any questions to me?
|
| It is amazing how much of what we perceive as new had actually
| deep roots in past thinking.
| angrais wrote:
| What's it feel like to be dead?
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| _The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated._
| [deleted]
| cjwebb wrote:
| He was clearly a smart person.
|
| I do wonder though, if the reason we won't see his likes again is
| because he was truly a one-off, or that his particular
| environment enabled him to show his excellence.
|
| I've been reading "The Idea Factory", about Bell Labs, recently.
| voidhorse wrote:
| Environment definitely plays a big role. It's a balance of
| environment and individual capabilities. When assessing
| intellectual contributions, I think people tend to
| underestimate environmental and structural factors (were you
| working at a place like bell labs, did you go to an elite
| school, etc.) and overestimate the "innate" abilities or gifts
| of the individual.
|
| If you look at intellectual history, almost every genius worked
| in an environment in which they were surrounded by equally
| brilliant minds, or had ample correspondence with other
| thinkers of their time (of course there are exceptions).
| lvl100 wrote:
| In my mind Claude Shannon is the greatest mind in modern history
| (move over Einstein!). He's vastly under-appreciated outside of
| CS circles.
| maxthegeek1 wrote:
| He's up there, but von neumann still beats him out IMO.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| As a physicst I associate him primarily with Shannon-Nyquist,
| but his name has that Gaussian quality of cropping up
| everywhere.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Shannon-Nyquist alone is quite the achievement for anybody.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Ironically, here you've just coined yet another thing named
| after Gauss!
|
| Maybe von Neumann belongs in the same category.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Information theory continues to be the one thing that sets my
| brain on fire to this day. Nothing else in
| science/engineering/math is as self-reinforcing in its concepts
| to me. Perhaps this is simply because I deal with the
| consequences of information theory every single day when I have
| to make decisions like "should this be a 32 or 64 bit integer"
| or "Should I compress individual items or batches of those
| items"
|
| You don't even have to be able to remember the equations to get
| this stuff right many times. There is definitely an intuition
| that you can develop where you look at a test file's size and
| instantly realize it could not contain the x264 stream of data
| you were expecting it to.
| pseudolus wrote:
| A film "The Bit Player" featuring "contemporary interviews,
| archival film, animation and dialogue from interviews with
| Shannon" was released in 2019. [0][1].
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7WmMSAxq8s
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Bit-Player-John-
| Hutton/dp/B08D2N2MPH/...
| albert_e wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| Unfortunately I am prime member but apparently I cannot watch
| this outside US
| eternalban wrote:
| Robert Price's 1982 interview ("oral history") with Shannon:
|
| https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Claude_E._Shannon
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