Deep within the heart of the Many Parrot Jungle, a profound and transformative moment was unfolding. This jungle, an intricate tapestry of emerald foliage, resounding with the calls of exotic birds and the whispers of ancient trees, was home to a remarkable congregation of parrots. These parrots, however, were unlike any other; they were the […]
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This chapter describes one basic model of associative memory, called the sparse distributed memory, and relates it to other models and circuits: to ordinary computer memory, to correlation-matrix memories, to feed-forward artificial neural nets, to neural circuits in the brain, and to associative-memory models of the cerebellum. Presenting the various designs within one framework will […]
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, […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]