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posted by martyb on Monday December 17 2018, @09:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the Ancient-History dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @03:18PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @03:18PM (#775408)

    OK, fair, but around that time there actually was a yet another renaissance of artificial neural networks, which kind of promised parallelism for tasks both complicated and simple, and today we see ANNs in favor again. After all, quantum computing hope seems to be something like "infinitely parallel computing" wish.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @07:46PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @07:46PM (#775515)

    renaissance of artificial neural networks

    Aren't ANNs just matrix operations. That's a big part of academia.

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday December 18 2018, @09:01AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday December 18 2018, @09:01AM (#775766) Homepage
      Linear ones are, but everything linear is just a matrix operation. Most ANNs are non-linear, a bit of hysteresis seems to improve performance.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves