
Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - ca98am79
http://www.longnow.org/views/essays/articles/ArtFeynman.php
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smanek
It amazes me that a guy with a nobel prize was willing to be told to go run to
the store to pick up office supplies because a 20-something told him to. Or be
willing to learn a whole new field (EE/CS) on a whim.

And this really amazes me: "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."

With no CS background he wrote a version of Basic that scaled up to 16,000
CPUs ... most CS PHd's would find that non-trivial. And he did it in a few
weeks.

I guess that's what makes Feynman Feynman.

Oh, this is pretty funny too: [http://www.fleen.com/uploads/2007/11/what-
would-richard-feyn...](http://www.fleen.com/uploads/2007/11/what-would-
richard-feynman-do.png)

~~~
whacked_new
> It amazes me that a guy with a nobel prize was willing to be told to go run
> to the store to pick up office supplies because a 20-something told him to.

Another is (apparently) Fermi, from WP: "Walking into the lab one day, Smyth
saw the distinguished scientist helping a graduate student move a table, under
another student's directions." He seems to be among the awesomest people to
ever walk the earth.

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wallflower
"Nothing made [Feynman] angrier than making something simple sound
complicated."

"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."

Great article. I didn't know Danny Hillis was such a talented writer. I love
reading Feynman's books and about him because it gives me a glimpse of what
the world looks like to a creative genius (which is closer to a child than an
adult) and how intelligence can be applied to _any_ problem.

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patrickg-zill
Just a side note - during the days of the Manhattan Project Feynman found
himself limited by the "computers" which were people that operated mechanical
calculators - they needed to compute by hand certain long equations to
determine the amount of certain materials they were going to need.

Back then, even, Feynman determined how to split up the work among several
people, in effect, he paralellized the computation.

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TY
An excellent essay indeed! Enjoyed reading it very much.

Danny Hillis is indeed a good writer. Even his Ph. D dissertation where he
describes Connection Machine is quite interesting to read (as far as Ph D
dissertations go!).

Bit of trivia - the CMs were programmed in Lisp. Why Lisp?

As per Danny Hillis: "Lisp was chosen... for a combination of technical and
social reasons. On the technical side, Lisp is extensible, has dynamic storage
allocation, and is generally good for symbol manipulation. In addition,
excellent Lisp programming environments already exist. On the sociological
side, most members of the AI community, for whom the Connection Machine was
originally designed, are already familiar with Lisp".

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trekker7
I liked this part:

"In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together,
we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel
computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we
studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either.
It was amateurs who made the progress."

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jmzachary
Does anybody know if there are more details out there for Feynman's buffer
analysis using PDEs? Is this an example of probabilistic analysis like bin
analysis, birthday paradox, etc.

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cmos
wow. This is an amazing story, and possibly one of the coolest things I've
read on the internet in quite some time.

Thank you.

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jpeterson
I love this man.

~~~
keener
I agree 100%. I've enjoyed reading about Feynman for about as far back as I
can remember. One of the true geniuses of all time, yet so damned human that
you can't help but love him.

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nazgulnarsil
the end brought tears to my eyes.

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newt0311
wasn't this same company featured on tdwtf? Interesting to look at if you want
a differing viewpoint.

~~~
smhinsey
this is actually a repost of a popular comment from the thread about that
daily wtf article.

