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I found an old memoir by someone who had worked with Richard Feynman way back in the 80's.
Those days seem to presage a lot of things that have become commercial hot topics these days -- highly parallel computers and neural nets.
One day in the spring of 1983, when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. (I was at the time a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab). His reaction was unequivocal: "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to prove it wrong—or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company.
In his last years, Feynman helped build an innovative computer. He had great fun with computers. Half the fun was explaining things to anyone who would listen.
I was alive those days; might I be as old as aristarchus?
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday December 17 2018, @03:01PM (1 child)
Feynmann wasn't half-wrong, as computers with millions of processors are still completely impractical for general computing purposes. Only very specialized tasks that lend themselves well to massive parallelization benefit from such architectures - and only after careful design and optimization.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 17 2018, @03:09PM
Of course, one of those massively parallelizable problems is MonteCarlo simulation, widely used in nuclear physics...
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