#BookStudies ### TC - Pg. XIII - The Creation of the Final Language > There are two kinds of creation myths: Those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky. *I wonder where AI fits into our ongoing fantasy that we call the modern world. Is it Prometheus? Or is it the golemr?* [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. XIII - The Creation of the Final Language]] ### TC - Pg. XV - In the beginning, was the command line. > "In the beginning," according to Neal Stephenson, "was the command line." *I thought this was apt when compared to my ideas in [[The Shell]]. A CLI predates the command. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. XV - In the beginning, was the command line.]] ### TC - Pg. 4 - The Turing Machine, Digital Preference > In 1936, logician Alan Turing had formalized the powers (and limitations) of digital computers by giving a precise description of a call of devices (including an obedient human being) that could read, write, remember, and erase marks on an unbounded supply of tape. These "Turing machines" were able to translate, in both directions, between bits embodied as structure (in space) and bits encoded as sequences (in time). Turing then demonstrated the existence of a Universal Computing Machine that, given sufficient time, sufficient tape, and a precise description, could emulate the behavior of any other computing machine. The results are independent of whether the instructions are executed by the tennis balls of electrons, and whether the memory is stored in semiconductors or on paper tape. "Being digital should be of more interest than being electronic," Turing pointed out. *This builds on what I learned from [[Areas/Reading/Books_Bk/Books/The Pattern On The Stone/TPotS - Pg. IX - The Second Principle of the Nature of Computing - The Universal Computer]]. *The computer is not necessarily technological, but it transcends it, as Hillis says. [[Areas/Reading/Books_Bk/Books/The Pattern On The Stone/TPotS - Pg. VIII - Computers Transcend Technology]] *I need to learn the definition of "digital". *[[Digital vs Electronic]] *Digital means that it comprises its function based on binary abstraction. Is binary the end all be all of computing? I don't know at the moment. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 4 - The Turing Machine, Digital Preference]] ### TC - Pg. 9-10 - The Goal of the First von Neumann Computer > The race was on to begin decoding living processes from the top down. And with the seeding of an empty digital universe with self-modifying instructions, we took the first steps towards the encoding of living processes from the bottom up. "Just because the special conditions prevailing on this earth seem to favor the forms of life which are based on organo-chemical compounds, this in no proof that it is not possible to build up other forms of life on an entirely different basis," Barricelli explained. The new computer was assigned two problems; how to destroy life as we know it, and how to create life of unknown forms. *Amongst the design of the most destructive weapon known to man, we began the building blocks of the step after purely mechanical technology. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 9-10 - The Goal of the First von Neumann Computer]] ### TC - Pg. 18 - What would be wiser than to give people who can think the leisure in which to do it? > What could be wiser than to give people who can think the leisure in which to do it? > - Walter W. Stewart to Abraham Flexner, 1939 *Wouldn't it be nice? * [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 18 - What would be wiser than to give people who can think the leisure in which to do it]] ### TC - Pg. 23 - Cross-Fertilization of Ideas > He set three immediate goals: to sponsor postdoctoral fellowships for promising young mathematicians, to free professors from crushing teaching loads, and to promote cross-fertilization between mathematics and other fields. "It has frequently happened that an attempt to solve a physical problem has resulted in the creation of a new branch of mathematics." This stinks of emergence. I really need to study synchronicity. [[The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge - Notes]] [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 23 - Cross-Fertilization of Ideas]] ### TC - Pg. 31 - The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge and The Institute for Advanced Study > "The Institute is, from the standpoint of organization, the simplest and least formal thing imaginable," he explained. "Each school is made up of a permanent group of professors and an annually changing group of members. Each school manages its own affairs as it pleases; within each group, each individual disposes of his time and energy as he pleases...The results to the individual and to society are left to take care of themselves." Flexner believed that knowledge, not profit, must be the goal of research. "As a matter of history, the scientific discoveries that have ultimately inured to the benefit of society either financially or socially have been made by men like Faraday and Clerk Maxwell who never gave a thought to the possible financial profit of their work," he wrote to the editors of Science in 1933, protesting against universities that were beginning to file for patents on their research. This did not mean that benefits should not be expected from pure research. In a *Harper's Magazine* essay titled "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge," Flexner described the thinking behind the Institute for Advanced Study and argued that "the pursuit of these satisfactions proves unexpectedly the source from which undreamed-of utility is derived." [[The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge - Notes]] [[The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge.pdf]] *This is why I let my mind wander wherever it thinks a connection could be made, because satisfactions are blank trail-signs that lead to discovery.* ![[Trailsign.png]] [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 31 - The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge and The Institute for Advanced Study]] ### TC - Pg. 45 - Theory of Games and Economic Behavior - von Neumann > After Threats of cancellation by Princeton University Press over the manuscript's escalating length, *Theory of Games and Economic Behavior* was finally published in 1944. Taking 673 pages to make their case, von Neumann and Morgenstern detailed how a reliable economy can be constructed out of unreliable parts, placing the foundations of economics, evolution, and intelligence on common mathematical ground. "Unification of fields which were formerly divided and far apart," they counseled in their introduction, "are rare and happen only after each field has been thoroughly explored." Game theory was adopted first by military strategists, and the economists followed. *I want to read this. Hopefully it's not too cerebral.* [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 45 - Theory of Games and Economic Behavior - von Neumann]] ### TC - Pg. 45 - A Mentally Superhuman Race > "If a mentally superhuman race ever develops, its members will resemble Johnny von Neumann," crediting an inexplicable "neural superconductivity," and adding that "if you enjoy thinking, your brain develops. And that is what von Neumann did. He enjoyed the functioning of his brain." If there wasn't anything to puzzle over, his attention wandered off. According to Herman Goldstine, "nothing was ever so complete as the indifference with which Johnny could listen to a topic or paper that he did not want to hear." *I have never related to a genius's attention span more.* [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 45 - A Mentally Superhuman Race]] ### TC - Pg. 46 - The Personality of a Genius > He evidenced "a chameleon-like ability to adapt to the people he was with," remembers Herman Goldstine, and never claimed he could not explain something to someone who did not understand the math. "It was like going out on glass, it was so smooth. He somehow knew exactly how to get you through the forest. Whenever he gave a lecture, it was so lucid, it was like magic, it all seemed so simple you didn't need to take notes." Nicholas remembers his brother returning to Budapest to deliver a lecture on quantum mechanics and giving a nontechnical summary to the extended family before his talk. "The light theories of Dirac are not easy to explain," Nicholas points out. *I believe this is my goal in conversational ability.* [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 46 - The Personality of a Genius]] ### TC - Pg. 60 - The Computer Disease > Feynman and Frankel were hooked. "Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about," Feynman later explained. "The trouble with computers is you play with them." *Just a fun quote. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 60 - The Computer Disease]] ### TC - Pg. 63 - A Unifying Force > "There is a unifying force behind all manifestations of nature, which we cannot fully comprehend, but we can try to explain it with the means at our disposal," says Nicholas Vonneumann, summing up his brother's life. "It was in this spirit that John tried to comprehend...the mysteries of atomic and subatomic particles through quantum mechanics, the mysteries of weather...through hydrodynamics and statistics, the mysteries of genetics and inheritance through his theory of self-reproducing automata." *I think it's interesting that his family was so taken aback by his deathbed conversion if he was this close to the root. *I look forward to meeting him and getting his take on heavenly technology. I hope he's studying now.* [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 63 - A Unifying Force]] ### TC - Pg. 103 - A Surety of God and Mind > (Gottfried) Leibnez believed, following Hobbes and in advance of Hilbert, that a consistent system of logic, language, and mathematics could be formalized by means of an alphabet of unambiguous symbols manipulated according to mechanical rules. In 1675, he wrote to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society and his go-between with Isaac Newton, that "the time will come, and one soon, in which we shall have a knowledge of God and mind that is not less certain than that of figures of numbers, and in which the invention of machines will no more difficult than the construction of problems in geometry." Envisioning what we now term software, he saw that the correspondence between logic and mechanism worked both ways. > Leibnez saw binary coding as the key to a universal language and credited its invention to the Chinese, seeing in the hexagrams of the *I Ching* the remnants of "a Binary Arithmetic...which I have rediscovered some thousands of years later." *I'd like to think on this more when I come back to [[Areas/Thoughts/Software 2.0|Software 2.0]]. The construction of machines is being streamlined every day.* *I also need to fully understand binary if I'm ever to get closer to [[Areas/Thoughts/Worldbuilding/Fiat]].* [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 103 - A Surety of God and Mind]] ### TC - Pg. 124 - The Turing Machine's Function as Described by George Dyson > The fundamental, indivisible unit of information is the bit. The fundamental, indivisible unit of digital computation is the transformation of a bit between its two possible forms of existence: as structure (memory) or as sequence (code). This is what a Turing Machine does when reading a mark (or absence of a mark) on a square of tape, changing its state of mind accordingly, and making(or erasing) a mark somewhere else. To do this at electronic speed requires a binary element that can preserve a given state over time, until, in response to an electronic pulse or some other form of stimulus, it either changes or communicates that state. "Most of the essential elements or 'Cells' in the machine are of binary, or 'on-off' nature," Bigelow and his colleagues explained in their first interim progress report. "Those whose state is determined by their history and are time-stable are memory elements. Elements of which the state is determined essentially but the existing amplitude of a voltage or signal are called 'gates.'" *I need to seriously ponder this statement. It is foundational to the functioning of every modern machine. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 124 - The Turing Machine's Function as Described by George Dyson]] ### TC - Pg. 156-157 - Intentionally Guided Dreaming > The damp, secluded outpost, deliberately situated as far as possible from any artificial magnetic fields, suited (Lewis Fry) Richardson, who cultivated an "intentionally guided dreaming," letting his mind balance between almost awake and almost asleep. "It is the 'almost' condition that is advantageous for creative thinking." > "The moon is brilliant, and the earth is a snowy brilliance under the moon. Jupiter, who was last night beside the moon, is now left a little way behind. Venus has just sunk ruddy in the West, after being for a long while a dazzling white splendor in the sky," Stapleton reported on December 26, 1917. "I have just come in from a walk with our Professor, and he has led my staggering mind through mazes and mysteries of the truth about atoms and electrons and about the most elusive God's creatures, the ether. *I think I'd like to read some Richardson. Also, let's do some research on the ether and relate it to [[Quantum Data Transfer]]. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 156-157 - Intentionally Guided Dreaming]] ### TC - Pg. 200-201 - Ulam's Demons > "Once in my life I had a mathematical dream which proved correct," remembers Stanislaw Ulam, born in Lwow, Poland, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1909. "I was twenty years old. I thought, my God, this is wonderful, I won't have to work, it will all come in dreams. But it never happened again." > "He was a maverick, a very complicated man, a Pole, and, above all, a study in contrasts and contradictions," Francoise explains. "He lived mainly in the confines of his mind." He was also gregarious. "Many of us at the Laboratory who were associated with hum knew how much he disliked being alone, how he would summon us at odd times to be rescued from the loneliness of some hotel room, or from the four walls of his office, after he had exhausted his daily round of long-distance calls," says his mathematical colleague Gian-Carlo Rota. "One day I mustered up the courage to ask him why he constantly wanted company, and his answer gave him away. 'When I am alone,' he admitted, 'I am forced to think things out.'" *A man terrified who tired of figuring things out. A scary thought in a way. *The first quote would be a solid soundbite if I can find the right AI. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 200-201 - Ulam's Demons]] ### TC - Pg. 205 - A Visual, Tactile Understanding > The physics at Los Alamos captivated Stan (Ulam). "I found out that the main ability to have was a visual, and also an almost tactile, way to imagine the physical situation, rather than a merely logical picture of the problems," he explains. "One can imagine the subatomic world almost tangibly, and manipulate the picture dimensionally and qualitatively, before calculating more precise relationships." *To think one of the greatest physicists of all time had a visual calculation is interesting. I think it plays into visual scripting methods. [[Tangible Coding]] [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 205 - A Visual, Tactile Understanding]] ### TC - Pg. 225 - Two Fun Quotes > The Star Maker...could make universes with all kinds of physical and mental attributes. He was limited only by logic. Thus, he could ordain the most surprising natural laws, but he could not, for instance, make twice two equal five. > - Olaf Stapledon, 1937 > "God does not play dice with the universe," Albert Einstein advised physicists Max Born...in 1936. There was no proscription against cards. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 225 - Two Fun Quotes]] ### TC - Pg. 243 - The Strongest Chapter Begins, Turing's Cathedral > In attempting to construct such machines, we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that he creates. > - Alan Turing, 1950 > The history of digital computing can be divided into an Old Testament whose prophets, led by Leibnez, supplied the logic, and a New Testament whose prophets, led by von Neumann, built the machines. Alan Turing arrived in between. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 243 - The Strongest Chapter Begins, Turing's Cathedral]] ### Turing's Cathedral - Electrical Model Illustrating a Mind Having a Will but Only Capable of Two Ideas ![[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/Turing's Cathedral -Electrical Model Illustrating a Mind Having a Will but Only Capable of Two Ideas.jpg]] [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/Turing's Cathedral - Electrical Model Illustrating a Mind Having a Will but Only Capable of Two Ideas]] ### TC - Pg. 250 - On Computable Numbers as Software > The title "On Computable Numbers" (rather than "On Computable Functions") signaled a fundamental shift. Before Turing, things were done to numbers. After Turing, numbers began doing things. By showing that a machine could be encoded as a number, and a number decoded as a machine, "On Computable Numbers" led to numbers (now called "software") that were "computable" in a way that was entirely new. *[[Functional Abstraction]] [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 250 - On Computable Numbers as Software]] ### TC - Pg. 251 - A Universal Machine to Imitate Other Machines > The fact that there is a universal machine to imitate all other machines was understood by von Neumann and a few other people. And when he understood it, then he knew what we could do. *The founding of virtualization is the universal computer. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 251 - A Universal Machine to Imitate Other Machines]] ### TC - Pg. 251-252 - Ordinals and O-Machines > Having pushed the boundaries of mathematical logic as far as he could with his Universal Machine, Turing began wondering about ways to escape the limitations of closed formal systems and purely deterministic machines. His PhD thesis, completed in May of 1938 and published as "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals" in 1939, attempted to transcend Godelian incompleteness by means of a succession of formal systems, incrementally more complete. "Godel shows that every system of logic is in a certain sense incomplete, but at the same time...indicates means whereby from a system L of logic a more complete system L' may be obtained," Turing explained. Why not include L'? And then, since L' is included, L"? Turing then invoked a new class of machines that proceed deterministically, step by step, but once in a while make nondeterministic leaps, by consulting "a kind of oracle as it were." > "We shall not go any further into the nature of this oracle apart from saying that it cannot be a machine," Turing explained (or did not explain). "With the help of the oracle, we could form a new kind of machine (call them O-machines)." Turing showed that undecidable statements, resistant to the assistance of an external oracle, could still be constructed, and the *Entscheidungsproblem* would remain unsolved. The Universal Turing Machine of 1936 gets all the attention, but Turing's O-Machines of 1939 may be closer to the way intelligence (real and artificial) works: logical sequences are followed for a certain number of steps, with intuition bridging the intervening gaps. STUDY THIS. THIS IS IMPORTANT. I think this is the next step between the computing we have now and the computing following the beginning of AI. The models will serve as the oracle for the machines. I think [[Prism - Monuments in Reclusion]] is an O-Machine if I can configure it correctly. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 251-252 - Ordinals and O-Machines]] ### TC - Pg. 261-262 - Unorganized Machines, the Precursor for Neural Networks. Conscious Machines. > Turing also explored the possibilities of "unorganized machines...which are largely random in their construction and made up from a rather large number N of similar units." He considered a simple model with units capable of two possible states connected by two inputs and one output each, concluding that "machines of this character can behave in a very complicated manner when the number of units is large." He showed how such unorganized machines ("about the simplest model of a nervous system") could be made self-modifying and, with proper upbringing, could become more complicated than anything that could be otherwise engineered. The human brain must start out as such an unorganized machine, since only in this way could something so complicated be reproduced. > Turing have provocative hints about what might lie ahead. "I asked him under what circumstances he would say that a machine is conscious," Jack Good recalled in 1956. "He said that if the machine was liable to punish him for saying otherwise, then he would say that it was conscious." Lyn Newman remembers long discussions between Max Newman and Turing over how to build machines that would modify their own programming and learn from their mistakes. "When I heard Alan say of further possibilities 'Wh-wh-what will happen at that stage is that we shan't understand how it does it, we'll have lost track' - I did find it a most disturbing prospect," she reported in 1949. Jack Good would later explain that "the ultraintelligent machine...is a machine that believes people cannot think." > The paradox of artificial intelligence is that any system simple enough to be understandable is not complicated enough to behave intelligently, and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently is not simple enough to understand. The path to artificial intelligence, suggested Turing, is to construct a machine with the curiosity of a child, and let intelligence evolve. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 261-262 - Unorganized Machines, the Precursor for Neural Networks. Conscious Machines.]] ### TC - Pg. 264 - A Prophecy Regarding Bing > An Internet search engine is a finite-state, deterministic machine, except at those junctures where people, individually and collectively, make a nondeterministic choice as to which results are selected as meaningful and given a click. These clicks are then immediately incorporated into the state of the deterministic machine, which grows ever so incrementally more knowledgeable with every click. This is what Turing defined as an oracle machine. > Instead of learning from one mind at a time, the search engine learns from the collective human mind, all at once. Every time an individual searches for something, and finds an answer, this leaves a faint, lingering trace as to where (and what) some fragment of meaning is. The fragments accumulate and, at a certain point, as Turing put it in 1948, "the machine would have 'grown up.'" [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 264 - A Prophecy Regarding Bing]] ### TC - Pg. 272 - von Neumann's Conversion > I am also deeply perturbed about the religious angle as it developed. Klari...told me about her own and your attempts to moderate anything that might appear in writing about it. - Marina von Neumann Just a good fact to hold onto. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 272 - von Neumann's Conversion]] ### TC - Pg. 274-275 - The End of Structure in Computing > If you examind the structure of a computer, "you could not possibly tell what it is doing at any moment," Bigelow explained. "The importance of structure to how logical processes take place is beginning to diminish as the complexity of the lofical process increases." Bigelow then pointed out that the significance of Turing's 1936 result was "to show in a very important, suggestive way how trivial structure really is." Structure can always be replaced by code. *I'd like to think on this part more. [[Study These]] [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 274-275 - The End of Structure in Computing]] ### TC - Pg. 292 - A Window to the Physical > "That seems reasonable," I agreed. "My own personal theory is that extraterrestrial life could be here already...and how would we necessarily know? If there is life in the iniverse, the form of life that will prove to be the most successful at propagating itself will be digital life; it will adopt a form that is independent of the local chemistry, and migrate from one place to another as an electromagnetic signal, as lonf as there's a digital world - a civilization that has discovered the Universal Turing Machine - for it to colonize when it gets there. And that's why von Neumann and you other Martians got us to build all these computers, to create a home for this kind of life." [[Tyndalos]] [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 292 - A Window to the Physical]] ### TC - Pg. 311 - In The Beginning, Was the Command Line > In the beginning was the command line: A human programmer supplied an instruction and a numerical address. There is no proscription against computers supplying their own instructions, and an ever-diminishing fraction of commands have ever been touched by human hands or human minds. Now the commands and addresses are as likely to be delivered the other way: the global computer supplies an instruction, and an address that maps to a human being via a personal device. [[Areas/Reading/Books/Computer Science/Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson/TC - Pg. 311 - In The Beginning, Was the Command Line]] [[Turing's Cathedral - Concepts]]