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HE NINETEENTH-CENTURY African American folk legend of John Henry I pits the "steel-driving man" in a race against a new invention, a steam-powered hammer, bashing a tunnel through a mountain of rock. It was my blessing and my curse to be the John Henry of chess and artificial intelligence, as chess computers went from…
Back in the early days of computers, one of the more popular methods of generating a sequence of random numbers was to employ the following scheme: 1. Choose a starting number between 0 and 1. 2. Multiply the starting number by 4 ("stretch" it). Subtract 4 times the square of the starting number from the quantity…
For Molly, computer play in a simulated world connected strongly with off-line play. It reinforced her desire to create fictional worlds of her own. And it helped sharpen her understanding of that creative endeavor. In evaluating the imaginative and creafive worth of childhood activities, of course, this is the gold…
VCs and entrepreneurs tend to be well educated. Well educated people think about education as an investment. You put as many of your resources in to an investment as you can. It may take 20 years to pay off, but if the return-on-investment is high (which it is for education) then you invest. This group of people — if…
The third technological revolution which I see coming is the expansion of life's habitat from Earth into the solar system and beyond. This revolution may take a little longer than the other two. Perhaps it may take as long as a hundred years from now. In charting a possible course for this revolution, I take as my…
Survey The first step, survey or skim, advises that one should resist the temptation to read the book and instead glance through a chapter in order to identify headings, sub-headings and other outstanding features in the text. This is in order to identify ideas and formulate questions about the content of the chapter…
To the social philosopher and the enlightened social reformer, and best of all to the plain citizen taking thought of these matters, the first step in the right direction, the first basic principle that must underlie an understanding of the present Social Disorder and be imbedded in the foundation of the Social Order…
An effective strategy of predator satiation involves two adaptations. First, the synchrony of emergence or reproductions must be very precise, thus assuring that hte market is truly flooded, and only for a short time. Secondly, this flooding cannot occur very often, lest predators simply adjust their own life cycle to…
[To] mechanical progress there is apparently no end: for as in the past so in the future, each step in any direction will remove limits and bring in past barriers which have till then blocked the way in other directions; and so what for the time may appear to be a visible or practical limit will turn out to be but a…
The starting point of Darwin's theory of evolution is precisely the existence of those differences between individual members of a race or species which morphologists for the most part rightly neglect. The first condition necessary, in order that any process of Natural Selection may begin among a race, or species, is…
It never occurred to me that there was going to be any stumbling block. Not that I had the answer, but [I had] the joy of going at it. When you have that joy, you do the right experiments. You let the material tell you where to go, and it tells you at every step what the next has to be because you're integrating with…
I have a true aversion to teaching. The perennial business of a professor of mathematics is only to teach the ABC of his science; most of the few pupils who go a step further, and usually to keep the metaphor, remain in the process of gathering information, become only Halbwisser [one who has superficial knowledge of…
No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain, yet it is not always the theory that is to blame. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress. It is also a first step in our attempt to find the principles implicit in familiar observational notions.
A crushing backload, indeed: fiddlehead ferns, downy woodpecker, pickerel, granite flake. Canada mayflower, moonrise, bluebirds, spring peepers, monarch butterflies, glacial scratches on bedrock, and, of course, the human history of my path, which in its transformations over the centuries encapsulates in many…
Attention is the fundamental literacy. Every second I spend online, I make decisions about where to spend my attention. Should I devote any mindshare at all to this comment or that headline? — a question I need to answer each time an attractive link catches my eye. Simply becoming aware of the fact that life online…
If we somehow manage to make an atomic size computer, it would mean that the dimension, the linear dimension, is a thousand to ten thousand times smaller than those very tiny chips that we have now. It means that the volume of the computer is 100 billionth or 10^-11 of the present volume, because the volume of the…
A spectacular variant of bogo-sort has been proposed which has the interesting property that, if the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, it can sort an arbitrarily large array in linear time. (In the Many-Worlds model, the result of any quantum action is to split the universe-before into a sheaf…