

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine (1989) - troystribling
http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-and-connection-machine/

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zix
I never can get enough stories about Richard Feynman. I thought I'd heard them
all, but somehow I missed this one. It's well written and captures many of the
things he worked on later in his life; not to mention it's a really cool
article about the beginnings of a rather ambitious project to make a parallel
computer in the early 1980s.

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mrdmnd
I took Alan Edelman's 18.337 class (Parallel Supercomputing) at MIT a few
years ago, and on the first day he brought in some boards that had been used
in the original Connection Machine - it was like looking into a piece of
living history to see circuits that had been influenced by Feynman. Fantastic
article!

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jpdoctor
This article was from the Physics Today memorial issue on Feynman iirc. When I
read it at the time, I seem to remember that it was also the weakest article
in that issue. (It was before Thinking Machines crashed and burned.)

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omegant
Amazing!, very good Feynman story that I didn't know. I love how Feynman
accepted those challenging problems.

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danh
Favorite part:

"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."

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AceJohnny2
I would've hoped someone of Feynman's level would've easily picked up a better
language.

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gliese1337
Someone like Feynman is capable of _inventing a new language_ for parallel
computing and _correctly simulating its execution by hand_.

That's a much more impressive skill than just learning another language.

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AceJohnny2
I don't think so. He didn't invent a new language, but extended an existing
one. And I simulate what a program does in my head all the time when debugging
(including multithreaded stuff, but I agree that's hard).

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thebadplus
"""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."""

What a gift of a human.

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ca98am79
previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191212>

