[HN Gopher] Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)
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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)
Author : jmstfv
Score : 141 points
Date : 2024-09-07 07:20 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (longnow.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (longnow.org)
| rbanffy wrote:
| It was posted many times in the past and I never mind seeing it
| again - the discussions are always worthy, and there's always a
| batch of HNers who never heard the story.
| pockybum522 wrote:
| I'm one of today's lucky ones, and I really enjoyed the read.
| datameta wrote:
| Same here. Great way to wake up.
| colanderman wrote:
| I've read the story a few times before, but am thankful for the
| reposting because I've actually been trying to figure out how
| to build a quantum physics simulator and was most recently
| stuck on how field interactions / Feynman diagrams came into
| play. Lo and behold the snippet on path integrals around the
| lattice, from Feynman himself solving the same problem!
| chris_wot wrote:
| I love to see the equation he came up with...
| monocasa wrote:
| Having looked into it, there's some circumstantial evidence
| that it was a variation of feynman's path integrals, which is
| sort of a technique for summing fields representing all of the
| possible pathways possible in an interaction and weighting
| their probabilities.
| Locutus_ wrote:
| Sorry to reply to a random comment of yours, but did you ever
| publish your CM-2 emulator?
| monocasa wrote:
| No worries; I have not yet.
| matt2000 wrote:
| Side note, the Connection Machine is pretty much the coolest
| looking computer ever:
| https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/story/73 It looks
| exactly to me what a powerful and slightly scary computer from an
| 80's movie looks like.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| They were apparently influenced by the WOPR from "War Games."
| Danny Hillis wanted to sell into the Pentagon.
| riedel wrote:
| And it was designed after the T-shirt that feynman wears on one
| of his most known pictures [0]. BTW: there we still have a
| nonfunctional CM which we equipped with LEDs to put fun games
| on it at the CS faculty in Karlsruhe [1]
|
| [0] https://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/cm-tshirt.html [1]
| https://www.teco.edu/~diener/
| nickt wrote:
| I mentioned this last time around [1], Tamiko Thiel worked with
| Feynman and Hillis at thinking machines and is responsible,
| amongst many other things, for how cool the CM-1 and CM-2
| looked.
|
| Also, the T-shirts! [2]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37688340
|
| [2] https://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/cm-tshirt.html
| globular-toast wrote:
| Ah, I always wondered what t-shirt he was wearing in one of
| my favourites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA
| dfox wrote:
| Well, my CM t-shirt is getting somehow worn out, I probably
| should order a new one.
| nintendo1889 wrote:
| The blinkerlights panel isn't even functional. But still cool
| looking .
|
| At the computer museum in Alpharetta Georgia, none of the
| computers are on but the connection machine panel is on.
| monocasa wrote:
| The blinken lights panel on the original machine was
| functional, each small cluster of processors controlled one
| LED and there was a microcode instruction for latching the
| LEDs.
| julianz wrote:
| We found this museum completely by accident on a visit to the
| US, and it is a delight. When I saw the Connection Machine
| all lit up, I squealed :)
|
| It seems like the reason it's on like that is because it used
| to belong to the NSA so they took all the insides out and
| destroyed them when the machine was donated. The
| blinkenlights are driven by Raspberry Pis or something
| similar.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| You can get a beautiful poster of it from
| https://www.docubyte.com/projects/guide-to-computing/ (scroll
| to the bottom).
|
| I've got docubyte's poster of the PDP-7 and it's great.
| colanderman wrote:
| The CM-5 did literally make an appearance [1] in Jurassic Park.
| Not the 80s, but 1993, so close.
|
| [1]
| http://www.starringthecomputer.com/snapshots/jurassic_park_t...
| delichon wrote:
| "'Give me something real to do.' So we sent him out to buy some
| office supplies."
|
| Great moments in management, and proof that Feynman had a well
| developed sense of humor or this would have been a shorter story.
| "One of the best minds on Earth just showed up, what do we do?"
| "We need pencils."
| auselen wrote:
| This story is in "surely you are joking mr. Feynman" or "what
| do you care what does other people think?".
|
| When they ask him to do something not concrete, that was his
| answer :) so he was preferring fetching pencils to thinking
| about applications of some technology...
| W-Stool wrote:
| Many, many years ago I saw a Connection Machine running. Let me
| just say it was not a machine that you just walked by. "What the
| hell is that thing?!?" was more like it.
| breck wrote:
| Danny Hillis wrote The Pattern on the Stone, one of my favorite
| books of all time, so I was very excited to see this essay.
|
| Wow, I was not disappointed.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This is an HN perennial favourite, with 39 submissions. Among the
| significant discussions:
|
| 8 years ago, 32 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12283614>
|
| 8 years ago, 61 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13762614>
|
| 3 years ago, 49 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28981275>
|
| 14 years ago, 46 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079473>
|
| 6 years ago, 33 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18987188>
|
| 11 years ago, 11 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5660763>
|
| 10 years ago, 23 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8681061>
|
| 14 years ago, 23 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1205500>
|
| 16 years ago, 15 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191212>
|
| 15 years ago, 10 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723361>
|
| 16 years ago, 12 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=311454>
|
| 17 years ago, 5 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834>
| ycombinete wrote:
| Equally remarkable: there are Tinyurl links to Amazon books in
| the post from 17 years ago that still resolve to the books'
| page on Amazon!
| smarks wrote:
| Note the date line on the article: Published on
| Sunday, January 15, 01989 * 35 years, 7 months ago
|
| Specifically, the five-digit year! Also the explicit listing of
| the age of the article. Most sites have a "human readable" or
| "friendly" date such as "published yesterday" but only for recent
| dates. Some sites, such as news sites, add a warning if the
| article is more than say five years old. Here, it's as if they're
| proud of the age. Since this was published by the Long Now
| Foundation it seems likely these were done deliberately.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| Yeah, this is a kind of calling card of the Long Now
| Foundation. See their landing page: "established in 01996 to
| foster long-term thinking"
|
| https://longnow.org/
| bhasi wrote:
| Loved this line: Every great man that I have
| known has had a certain time and place in their life that they
| use as a reference point; a time when things worked as they were
| supposed to and great things were accomplished.
|
| This has inspired me to work harder so that I find myself in such
| a flow state in either a work situation or a life situation in
| the not too distant future, say, a decade.
| largbae wrote:
| > We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by
| getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made
| in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement
| of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products,
| Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned
| presentation. "Don't say `reflected acoustic wave.' Say [echo]."
| Or, "Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Just say there's a
| bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out."
| Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound
| complicated.
|
| I wish this idea would take hold in academia. So many papers seem
| to bury simple and often powerful ideas in jargon.
| xiande04 wrote:
| 1. In academia, you need to be exact. You can't use vernacular
| words with many interpretations. You need to describe as
| precisely as possible your hypothesis, the methods you used to
| test it, and your results. Jargon avoids ambiguity.
|
| 2. The purpose of a scientific paper is not to communicate it
| to general audiences. It's to describe, in detail, a study you
| performed so that others can attempt to reproduce it. The
| audience of a scientific paper is other scientists in the same
| field. Communication of the results to a general audience is
| another matter.
| downut wrote:
| I think the quote implies that Feynman's suggested changes
| were for marketing materials. It turns out myself and my
| colleagues were the intended targets of those marketing
| materials. We ignored them and just benchmarked the system.
|
| In the end none of it mattered because it was next to
| impossible to achieve significant fractions of the quoted
| "peak" performance for real world/non-embarrassingly parallel
| algorithms. Especially with the CM-2 and 64 bit floating
| point.
| akira2501 wrote:
| 1. I think you're describing publishing and not academia as a
| whole. It's sad that the two have become so intractable in
| many minds.
|
| 2. If you don't ever cater to general audiences your field is
| less accessible in many important ways. Which seems like
| intentional gatekeeping given the economic realities of #1.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| For a while, I worked for a physicist who resembled Feynman in
| many of his beliefs and behaviors. He once told me about how he
| changed his writing style over time. In his early papers, he
| would cite poorly understood theories while assuming that the
| reader understood them. At that time, he was exhibiting
| "academic arrogance" and basically looking down upon anybody
| who could not understand his work. After teaching for a while,
| he changed his style to use well-understood terms and theories.
| He had realized that his papers would be more valuable if more
| people understood them.
|
| We are still in touch, and have learned much from each other.
| spoonfeeder006 wrote:
| My favorite is in nutrition research papers when they say
| something like "At 8am the subjects consumed a standardized
| breakfast"
| fsckboy wrote:
| Brewster Kahle's wikipedia page says that straight from
| undergraduate "he joined the Thinking Machines team, where he was
| the lead engineer on the company's main product, the Connection
| Machine, for six years (1983-1989)"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Kahle#Life_and_career
|
| this statement has to be wildly exaggerated, it was a hardware
| project and he was a green software "kid". Anybody from Thinking
| Machines know what his actual job was?
| justin66 wrote:
| I have no idea but I have a suspicion that Thinking Machines
| was a company where the most senior people had "scientist" in
| their title rather than "engineer."
| ycombinete wrote:
| It's been an unresolved topic in the Talk page for that article
| since 2019:
|
| _The article also states that he was "lead engineer on the
| Connection Machine", the main product of the company. Given
| that he had just graduated with a bachelor's degree and the
| high profile startup was filled with PhD engineers and managers
| with experience... it's just not possible. Possibly, he was
| lead engineer on WAIS. 98.13.244.125 (talk) 02:54, 30 July 2019
| (UTC)_
| justin66 wrote:
| It's interesting that the commentator didn't even consider
| the possibility that the lead engineer might report to
| architects and/or scientists.
| djmips wrote:
| First of all, being a "kid" doesn't mean you can't engineer
| hardware - didn't he graduate with a degree in computer
| engineering? Second, lots of people have gone from hardware
| design at their career start and into software later. The main
| hardware designer of the 3DFX chips does Java stuff now.
| fsckboy wrote:
| thinking machines was extremely well financed and cutting
| edge research and attracted very high powered people deeper
| into their careers, like for instance Feynmann. The fact that
| a kid can found a company does not make it likely a kid was
| running this enterprise
| andrewgleave wrote:
| """But what Richard hated, or at least pretended to hate, was
| being asked to give advice. 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. And whatever he
| understood, he could make others understand as well. Richard made
| people feel like a child does, when a grown-up first treats him
| as an adult. He was never afraid of telling the truth, and
| however foolish your question was, he never made you feel like a
| fool."""
|
| This is why he is spoken of with such reverence and why his
| insights have profoundly impacted both scientists and non-
| scientists alike. Few Nobel laureates have achieved such popular
| influence.
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