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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
Abstract – TSS/8 is an existence proof for a small-scale time-sharing system. Design, development, and performance analysis have occurred in quasiparallel. Performance analysis includes two models and two levels of simulation (using SIMULA). The final simulation, an accurate model of the real operating system, predicts the observed behavior. C. Gordon Bell, “Design and Behavior of […]