Artificial Intelligence Programming

LISP has jokingly been called “the most intelligent way to misuse a computer.” I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts. — Edsger Dijkstra. LISP was the world’s first elegant language, […]

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Introduction: A Musico-Logical Offering. The book opens with the story of Bach’s Musical Offering. Bach made an impromptu visit to King Frederick the Great of Prussia, and was requested to improvise upon a theme presented by the King. His improvisations formed the basis of that great work. The Musical Offering and its story form a […]

Engine Summer

The beginning. . . . If I am only a story now, I must have a beginning. Shall I begin by being born? Is that a beginning? I could begin with that silver glove you wear; that silver glove, and the ball . . . Yes, I will start with Little Belaire, and how I […]

The Bell System Technical Journal, V. 57, N. 6, July/August, 1978

The UNIX story begins with Ken Thompson’s work on a cast-off PDP-7 minicomputer in 1969. He and the others who soon joined him had one overriding objective: to create a computing environment where they themselves could comfortably and effectively pursue their own work-programming research. The result is an operating system of unusual simplicity, generality, and, […]

PURR-PUSS: Computer Simulation of a Teachable Machine

Abstract: Simulated on a computer, PURR-PUSS is a machine that can be taught. When connected to a robot body in the real world, ‘she’ can learn on her own or with the help of a human teacher. Her experience is stored in small ‘pieces’ which are used for prediction, decision and novelty-seeking. Unlike other products […]

The other Turing machine

Abstract – In a little known report written in 1945, A.M. Turing made a detailed proposal for the construction of a stored program computer. Although sharing some ideas with von Neumann’s draft report of the same year, Turing’s proposal contained a wide range of novel and formative concepts. These include subroutines, the stack and a […]

What Have We Learned from the PDP-11?

In the six years that the PDP-11 has been on the market, more than 20,000 units in 10 different models have been sold. Although one of the original system design goals was a broad range of models, the actual range of 500 to 1 (in cost and memory size) has exceeded the design goals. The […]

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

At the heart of this book (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind) is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier hallucinatory mentality by cataclysm and catastrophe only 3,000 years ago and […]

The Cray computers of Seymour Cray

Seymour Cray (1925–1996) is a USA engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers, that were the fastest in the world for decades. Sometimes recognized as the father of supercomputing, Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. The CDC 6600 was a large-scale, solid-state, general-purpose computing system. It had a distributed […]

The Laws of Form

The theme of this book is that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin […]