
Dr. John von Neumann at the dedication of the NORD (1954) - bindidwodtj
https://ftp.arl.army.mil/mike/comphist/54nord/
======
Game_Ender
I believe this machine is really the NORC [0]. Some highlights from the
Wikipedia article: It had 2000 words of memory, each that stored a ~13 digit
decimal number and it ran at about ~15000 operations/second. It was considered
the most powerful computer in the word when released, and at the dedication it
set a record for pi @ 3089 digits, calculated in 13 minutes.

0 -
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Naval_Ordnance_Research_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Naval_Ordnance_Research_Calculator)

~~~
bindidwodtj
It is! I didn't notice, I just copied the title

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tomcam
Thrilling if you know who he is. Also nice not to hear the awful (to me) mid-
Atlantic accent favored by American public speakers until about 1995

~~~
jacobolus
> _nice not to hear the awful (to me) mid-Atlantic accent_

Why would a native Hungarian who moved to the US in his mid 20s use an
affected prestige accent from the US Northeast?

~~~
amylene
The same reason anyone did: signal status. Immigrants can be self conscious of
their accents, so it seems even more likely that a normal person would feel
that impulse.

JvN was no ordinary person.

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ipnon
Imagine von Neumann on a podcast like Lex Fridman's "AI Podcast" or Eric
Weinstein's "The Portal". Would this diminish our view of his legacy, for him
to come "down to earth"?

~~~
ZhuanXia
>Would this diminish our view of his legacy, for him to come "down to earth"?

I doubt it. Consider how the greatest minds of the 20th century thought of
him:

"I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von
Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward
Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good
friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John]
von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no
one ever disputed me."

— Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner

"You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how
much faster von Neumann is compared to me."

— Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi to his former PhD student Herb Anderson.

"One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I
could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it
back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation. He
could also translate it at no diminution in speed from its original language
into English. On one occasion I tested his ability by asking him to tell me
how The Tale of Two Cities started. Whereupon, without any pause, he
immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to
stop after about ten or fifteen minutes."

— Herman Goldstine, mathematician and computer pioneer.

"I always thought Von Neumann’s brain indicated that he was from another
species, an evolution beyond man."

— Nobel Laureate Hans A. Bethe.

In his final days, Neumann tragically lost his genius to brain cancer. His
friend Edward Teller said this about it:

“I think that von Neumann suffered more when his mind would no longer
function, than I have ever seen any human being suffer."

Gwern has a funny essay about cloning Von Neumann here:
[https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#glue-robbers-
sequenci...](https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#glue-robbers-sequencing-
nobelists-using-collectible-letters)

As Neumann seemed to be god-like intelligent, highly personable, and very
kind, if we were to clone any historical figure, he seems like a good bet!

~~~
p1esk
He also said something like “if we can nuke them today, why wait till
tomorrow?”, referring to the Soviets.

~~~
ZhuanXia
The historical context for that statement is it was made when America had a
monopoly on nuclear weapons and Stalin's Soviet Union, a dictatorship of
incomparable authoritarianism and delusion, was on the cusp of developing such
weapons. Few would have predicted that a nuclear war would not occur once that
happened. Under these circumstances, a first strike followed by occupation may
have been rational. And given the complete insanity, cruelty and dehumanizing
brutality of Soviet policy in the following 50 years, it's possible American
occupation of the Soviet union would have saved many lives on net. See East vs
West Berlin, for example. His position on first-strike was not very irrational
given what was known at the time. Even in hindsight, it is hard to say either
way.

~~~
nl
It's a good thing that decisions to massacre hundreds of millions of people
isn't made like this, then.

Many highly rational people get sucked into making decisions merely on math,
ignoring the ethical aspects. Ironically, on HN that decision making process
is often mirrored and so discussions tend to fall into the same trap.

------
chrisco255
It would be nice to have a web-friendly audio format for these rather than
.au.

~~~
andylynch
This page looks to be from the mid-nineties, when it probably was- I was still
pleasantly surprised the audio played just fine in my iPhone browser 25 years
later!

~~~
chrisco255
Sadly it doesn't appear to work in Chrome on Android.

