At around 1439, Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type and changed the world. Print media was born. Newspapers came into being. They motivated people. They exposed secrets and cover-ups. They overthrew governments. They united people. They gained independence for countries. They kept people informed. Educated them. Motivated them. They told awesome stories and events from around the world. They sold because of quality content. All were happy. Then more newspapers came. Then competition began. Then money became the goal. Newspapers became business. Profit making business. Newspapers had to sell. Not quality. Quality got replaced by cleavage. Cleavage sold. Sold to the young minds. The future of this country is run by the young minds inspired by the cleavage of women glorified by Deccan Chronicle. People no longer buy pornographic magazines. They buy the likes of Deccan Chronicle and the daily supplement in the Times of India. Hustler and Debonair are no longer profitable. They now have to compete with the Times of India and Deccan chronicle priced much lower and serving millions of people more than Hustler and Debonair can possibly reach.

Which porn newspaper do you subscribe to?

Image source: http://www.blogcadre.com/files/images/superheroes.jpg

http://www.pluggd.in/2008/07/microsoft-facebook-google-from-india-can-indian-society-produce-gates-larry-zuckerburg


To quote from the article:


#2 Our Aversion toward extremism

We, as a society enshrine moderation. No one likes to take a firm stand and people feel offended when you advocate your belief passionately. I feel this uneasiness every time I advocate the merit of Wikipedia and ask people to contribute to it. Folks around us expect us to dilute every assertion with “It depends” and avoid confrontation. But confrontation and friction is required for excellence.
We need to teach ourself that confrontation is not insubordination. Single minded obsessive focus on one thing is a must for creating something which is out of the world. But sadly no one I know wants to work with a leader who is extremely obsessed about his work .

Brilliant read.

I have refrained from reading Indian authors because a few attempts at reading them gave me a feeling that the books are based on emotions of people and not on research which is the case with most american and british fiction writers.

And then, I picked up The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie.



I was running out of money to by a hard bound copy of the book. But the book looked so beautiful that I wanted it real bad. But imagine my excitement when it turned out that there was no unbounded version of the book.

And then, after reading a few pages, I figured, the inside of the book is as beautiful as the outside. Words so beautifully express content and make one fall in love with the language of Rushdie. I have not finished the book yet. But from what I have read, I have figured that the research and the story don't matter in this book. The language itself is so beautiful that it deserves a read. Beautiful usage of words.

A special mention would be the paragraph where Rushdie explains why Akbar is the Great King of Kings. In less than a page, with beautiful words, Rushdie convinces you that Akbar was indeed a great King. Would I have ever cared otherwise?

I am impressed.

Believing in something that is as unfounded as religion and god is so rampant because people are way too lazy to put in the effort to find out the reason why the world exists as it does. On the other hand, religion just gives an explanation to everything in a plate for people to digest. And since many seem to be digesting it easily, a lot more are motivated to do the same. On the other hand, doing science to figure out why things behave the way they do is a more complex task which not all can do and consequently science takes a second place to religion in society in terms of followers. But little do people realize that the conveniences in their lives are not served by religion but by science. The utter lack of respect for that source of comfort and knowledge and the profound respect for something as irrational as religion and god is highly disturbing and contrary to the human ability to accept reason. Perhaps, accepting reason is like common sense, not so common. But one can take relief in knowing that as generations pass, people see the truth and a day will come when rational thinking and science drive man's growth exponentially uninhibited by the dogmas of religion and god.

"There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence—or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them."
—The Lost Worlds of 2001, 1972 - Arthur C. Clarke

"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion."
—"Credo," Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected Essays, 1934-1998, 1999 - Arthur C. Clarke

"Once you start doubting, just like you are supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don't know what is true, we are trying to find out, and everything is possibly wrong.

Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong. Let us see. As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge, which is hard to recover from and so on. With the scientific view, or my father's view, that we should look to see what is true, and what maybe and what may not be true, once you start doubting, which I think to me is a very fundamental part of my soul, to doubt and to ask, and when you doubt and ask it gets a little harder to believe.

You see, one thing is, I can live without knowing and uncertainity and not knowing. I think its much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainity about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we are here, and what that question might mean. I might think about it a little bit and if I can't figure it out, then I go onto something else, but I don't have to know an answer, I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysteriour universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me." - Richard Feynman

I am no economic expert and my thoughts on this matter may not be well founded. But I can't help but feel that I might be right about the negative consequence of these loan waivers on the Indian economy.

The Indian finance minister announced farmer loan waivers worth Rs. 60,000 crores at this year's budget a few weeks back. This amounts to approximately $15 Billion if my math is right. Also announced was the minimum taxable salary raise from Rs. 1,00,000 p.a to Rs. 1,50,000 p.a for men. The latter announcement made me feel good about the fact that I would now take home more money than earlier. This latter announcement however clouded my judgement of the former.

A cursory glance made me feel that the loan waiver could help the agricultural sector and add to the already booming economy. But deeper analysis complemented by few incidents that I encountered recently make me believe that this might have been a big mistake on the part of the government. There was an uproar by the opposition that the budget rewards were a political tactic to secure votes for the next election. Most of India still being an agrarian society contributes a huge percentage to the vote bank. If the opposition claims are true and if the decisions are not backed by sound economic priniciples, India might be in for trouble.

Social and economic progress in any society is a direct result of the effort of the people to produce and add value to the system. Hard work implies more production implies more money with value implies increased purchasing power implies comforts implies increased standard of living.
This is the only way economic development happens provided there are no artificial obstacles and the people work honestly.

Without the artificial economic boosters that the governement puts in place, society would progress at a slower pace, but progress it will. When there is increased production, the impact is visible in all classes of the society. The labor class moves up to become small and medium land owners. The medium land owners become large land owners and the previously large land owners become super large land owners or move out of the agricultural business into an industry that can make better use of the money he/she has. This brings up the question - who fills the role of the labor class if they move up the social scale? Machines are the answer. Advancement is science as contributed to by those who can afford good education in middle and upper classes results in automation of the role previously filled by the labor class. This is a natural process and as time progresses more work is done by machines than humans. But effectively, we have achieved economic development.

People work to earn a living. If they have a tough start then they possibly take loans for an initial setup. This is followed up with additional hardwork to pay off the loans and lead to an individual's economic stability. All this work contributes to greater production which leads to social and economic progress.

At the lowest level of the agriculture society in india are laborers who toil with tools in the lands of the land owners who pay them daily wages. Besides the labor job, some of these people also own small plots of land which feeds them enough for their survival. The day job is a means to provide basic amenities like clothing and shelter.

By announcing the huge loan waiver for farmers, the government has artificially raised the standard of living of the agricultural class. This is especially applicable to the poorer of the agricultural class as the loan waiver is only entitled to people with limited land and income. By artificially raising the living standards of the labor class, the government induced an aritifial labor shortage there by affecting the medium and large land owners. There are no machinery to replace the gap left by the missing labor class. Even if there is machinery, it is not affordable to the land owners.

As ridiculous as true is the notion that a lot of people in the labor class are more than happy having three meals a day, a roof over the head, a television for entertainment and clothing for comfort. Most people do not feel the need to work more and struggle to increase their own standard of living. People are complacent by nature in the convenience of the known where risks are limited. By raising the standard of living of these people artificially, the government has effectively created an environment which invalidates the labor class' need to work.

As an interesting example, a friend of mine narrated an incident in her home town where her she owns coffee estates. Daily wages for coffee picking were Rs. 65 and the laborers worked 6 days a week. When the daily wages were increased to Rs. 75, people started turning up for work only for 5 days because now they made approximately the same money as earlier working for a lesser amount of time. The laborers conveniently chose to stay put at home rather than work for an extra day. This resulted in unplucked coffee and destroyed crops. Prices of coffee fell. This is the general scenario in the home state of my parents where there is a severe shortage of laborers because of loan waivers and other benefits government provides to the low income class of people. The labor shortage exists inspite of the land owners willing to pay more wages.

Add to the above scenario the loan waivers and we can see that agricultural production will slowly come to a halt. When that happens, prices for commodities will soar and inflation will rise. In the end this inflation will affect the very same labor class who will now struggle to meet their basic maxims of life working for 5 days. Now they will have to start working much more than earlier to earn as much as earlier which isn't enough anymore (because of inflation). This not only affects the labor class but everyone who needs for for survival.

I hope I am wrong for the sake of seeing progress in society. But I fear otherwise. This money would have been better used building better roads all around the country. Setup a committee that oversees corruption free implementation of good roads. This would have a greater impact on the economy overall including the agricultural sector by helping save transportation time of goods produced and commutation time of people who can spend more time working.

A friend today asked me if I thought being ambitious was wrong and if it isn't, is being ambitious above everything else wrong? While my initial instincts jumped to vote for being ambitious, I decided to think over and analyze before I give my final word.

To find the answer to this question, it is necessary to dig deeper and find the origin of ambition and evaluate its role in life. It is also necessarity to evaluate the conflict of interests that can arise between ambitions and a social life (which I suspect is what my friend meant referred to as "above all else".

Without dwelling really deep into the purpose of life, and for the sake of a realistic answer to that question, and most importantly to settle for a definite answer, I would say happiness is the purpose of life. Everything people do in life is meant to make them happy. Being happy for as many instances in a life time as possible is the ultimate purpose of life. Whether people realize it consciously or not, everything they do is to try and keep themselves happy. I have even caught myself feeling happy about being in an orgy of depression and sadness.

If happiness is the purpose of existence, then to achieve happiness one must accomplish feats that require an effort as input. The gratification of effort is the source of happiness in a man. To constantly put in effort to accomplish that which was set as a goal is the key to deriving happiness. The more the goals, the more the efforts, the more the sense of accomplishment, the more the gratification of efforts and hence - more the happiness.

Ambitions are not necessarily a long term goal. One could be ambitious about cooking great food, another for being productive at work, another for having good relationships with other people. People tend to associate career goals with ambitions. While that is not incorrect, a career goal is simply a layer of abstraction over smaller ambitions. Ambition to work hard plus ambition to think and come up with great ideas plus ambition to learn programming plus ambition to code a great idea plus ambition to learn marketing plus ambition to manage a project, all these ambitions put together and when accomplished would satisfy the ambition to make a lot of money which would could be a career goal or a greater ambition for a software programmer. This career goal is eventually realized when these induvidual ambitions are realized. Each step is rewarding in itself, contributing to smaller sources of happiness and in the end when the pieces fit together, there is a greater sense of accomplishment and happiness.

A person could have a set of unconnected ambitions that lead to happiness. For instance, finding a life partner might be an ambition that has nothing to do with a career goal (though a good partner might be instrumental in motivating a person to achieve a career goal). Having said that, it is hard to distinguish ambitions with targets in social life. The latter is a subset of the former. In effect, the answer to my friend's question probably is: consider all as ambitions, identify that which would give the most happiness, work towards that ambition which is more likely to be more rewarding. A key factor to consider is time. People tend to pay a lot of attention to career because working towards to a long term goal constitutes the greatest effort (though this happens in smaller steps) over a longer period of time. It might be wise to prioritize that ambition which one knows he/she would put in the maximum time of their life into to see the results of.

To summarize, everything in life is an ambition. The key is to prioritize each of these ambitions in the order of magnitude of happiness that comes as a reward for the efforts that go into fulfilling these ambitions. And of course, all this is based on the assumption that happiness is the purpose of life.

Data centers are huge buildings where massive chunks of computers sit together and process data. They are also where massive amounts of data are stored on hard drives. Think of companies like yahoo and google having huge amounts of user and general data. Where are all these stored? These are stored in data centers owned by these companies where there are hundreds of thousands of computers and hard drives processing information flying across the internet. Such a dense concentration of computers and hard drives in a building can result in extremely hot environments where temperatures are easily around 45 degree celsius (with all the cooling).

Companies like yahoo and google make significant investment in providing cooling solution for these computers. They are easily more than 10% of the cost of the entire hardware that run to billions of dollars in total value. A brilliant idea to cool these data centers would be to build data centers in ships and park them in antartic or arctic waters where they are weather cooled. Underwater submarine cables can connect to these ships and power rest of the world with information. In any case, very few people live in data centers and most of it is controlled over the internet from other places. So antartica would be quite feasible. This would be like an offshore oil-well, only this time its an information well. Nuclear reactors in ships could power these data centers and the crew to run the ship can be changed once in a while.

Hmm... I need to think of a way to monetize this idea....

In my latest attempts to reason out everything around me, I now have a new theory for everything that exists. The grand unified theory of everything that Einstein and everyone after him have been trying to figure out. They have been looking in the wrong place!!! This explains all the unsolved mysteries of the world. It is the perfect solution. It brings everything under one fundamental idea. A single idea to reason out all other ideas without a contradiction. Here goes:

Everything begins with a single thought. A thought calling itself in recursion leading to more thoughts. It is thought reproduction. A thought leading to more thoughts further club together amongst themselves to form more thoughts and so on in an infinite chain. A massive permutation and combination of thoughts leading to more thoughts that never end. It is in the outer periphery of these thought combinations that totally new unheard of ideas are formed. New thoughts. These again get reused by merging with other thoughts to form still newer thoughts. It goes on and on and on.....

There are no physical forms, no atoms, no god, no tables and no keyboards. But the idea of such things simply existing as thoughts that form from other smaller thoughts. The idea of me, a human, is merely a collaboration of smaller thoughts. Fzkl is a thought formed from smaller thoughts that describe a physical form whose countours are shaped a certain way that other thoughts can identify. These countours are actually smaller ideas. The human body is a complex thought consisting of smaller thoughts that define internal organs and their functional mechanism. The many humans we see are merely thought's replicated with minor changes. Since there are an infinite permutations of thoughts, it is inevitable that there will be shit load of humans who have the same basic form but can still be distinct. 7 Billion distinct thoughts. All formed from previous thoughts. And this is just for humans. Extend this idea to everything around and this explains how everything exists.

We are all just thoughts floating, just existing, nothing is real but for the thoughts. And whats even more interesting is: a thought is created by another thought. So, in reality, a thought is just an imagination of another thought and thus does not exist. The implication of this is that there is only one thought which thinks other thoughts that think other thoughts and so on. And combinational thoughts sustain the first thought like as I am doing now by documenting the existence of the very first thought. A self sustaining recursive thought mechanism is the cause for the existence of everything that has ever been thought of. Contradictions can exist because two separate thoughts can be totally opposite but still exist because their combination came from different kinds of parental thoughts.

Its easy to draw an analogy to sexual reproduction. The young one has the traits of the parents. Child thoughts derive their characteristics from parent thoughts. And parents can differ and give rise to possibly opposite thoughts. Families of thoughts, their ancestors, forefathers.

My brain is currently overloaded and I can't keep going on. I may have to come back to this if there is a need. On a casual first read this theory of everything might come across as being flawed, but nothing that cannot be reasoned out because my idea permits existence of flaws. Flaws are merely thoughts of opposing nature to existing thoughts. So in effect, my idea is flawless and I do not have to reason out anything. Everything is understood implicitly - as thoughts.

I call myself a late luncher. The lunch time at work is 1PM to 2PM and I go for food only at 2PM. I do this to avoid sitting with colleagues and indulge in pointless gossip. This way, I typically spend only about 10-15 minutes for lunch instead of an hour. There are times when a few colleagues end up at the cafeteria when I am having lunch and the expected pointless conversations ensue.

One such meeting involved a discussion with a muslim colleague of mine on the leave policy at work. He wanted to know how I was able to convince my manager to take two weeks off from work as he was in need of a long vacation. He wanted to take off for 42 days starting august. That was a really long duration for a leave. I couldn't help but ask the reason for such a long leave and I was stumped by his reply which was: I want to go to this religious course in the mosque where I reach a higher level of religious acheivement, closer to god. I was too shocked to not ask any further questions except one.

I have been doing training sessions at work on an architecture called PCI Express for my colleagues. Its a 24 week session (1 session a week) that dissects the PCI Express architecture to the BIT level. The lunch encounter with my muslim colleague happened before the first class of the the training. Knowing what was in the pipleline, I asked my colleague if he was going to miss the training sessions and he said he didn't have a choice. He had made his priority the fullfilling of his religious interest.

Three weeks have passed by since this incident and I have completed three sessions in PCI Express. My muslim colleague who is to go only in august attended the three sessions that I have completed so far. Today at lunch I happened to be at the table along with him yet again. I asked him if he had spoken to my manager about the leaves and got them approved and he replied that he had decided to push his religious interest to later. When asked for the reason, his genuine response was: "I do not want to miss out on the architecture training sessions you are doing". This was inspite of him knowing that my sessions were being recorded.

I didn't say anything yet again. But I was filled with a certain sense of happiness. For me, science had won over religion. I have contributed in my own small way to peace in this world.

One day 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. His reaction was unequivocal, "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either 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.

Richard's interest in computing went back to his days at Los Alamos, where he supervised the "computers," that is, the people who operated the mechanical calculators. There he was instrumental in setting up some of the first plug-programmable tabulating machines for physical simulation. His interest in the field was heightened in the late 1970's when his son, Carl, began studying computers at MIT.

I got to know Richard through his son. I was a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Carl was one of the undergraduates helping me with my thesis project. I was trying to design a computer fast enough to solve common sense reasoning problems. The machine, as we envisioned it, would contain a million tiny computers, all connected by a communications network. We called it a "Connection Machine." Richard, always interested in his son's activities, followed the project closely. He was skeptical about the idea, but whenever we met at a conference or I visited CalTech, we would stay up until the early hours of the morning discussing details of the planned machine. The first time he ever seemed to believe that we were really going to try to build it was the lunchtime meeting.

Richard arrived in Boston the day after the company was incorporated. We had been busy raising the money, finding a place to rent, issuing stock, etc. We set up in an old mansion just outside of the city, and when Richard showed up we were still recovering from the shock of having the first few million dollars in the bank. No one had thought about anything technical for several months. We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard walked in, saluted, and said, "Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss, what's my assignment?" The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students was astounded.

After a hurried private discussion ("I don't know, you hired him..."), we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems.

"That sounds like a bunch of baloney," he said. "Give me something real to do."

So we sent him out to buy some office supplies. While he was gone, we decided that the part of the machine that we were most worried about was the router that delivered messages from one processor to another. We were not sure that our design was going to work. When Richard returned from buying pencils, we gave him the assignment of analyzing the router.

The Machine

The router of the Connection Machine was the part of the hardware that allowed the processors to communicate. It was a complicated device; by comparison, the processors themselves were simple. Connecting a separate communication wire between each pair of processors was impractical since a million processors would require $10^{12]$ wires. Instead, we planned to connect the processors in a 20-dimensional hypercube so that each processor would only need to talk to 20 others directly. Because many processors had to communicate simultaneously, many messages would contend for the same wires. The router's job was to find a free path through this 20-dimensional traffic jam or, if it couldn't, to hold onto the message in a buffer until a path became free. Our question to Richard Feynman was whether we had allowed enough buffers for the router to operate efficiently.

During those first few months, Richard began studying the router circuit diagrams as if they were objects of nature. He was willing to listen to explanations of how and why things worked, but fundamentally he preferred to figure out everything himself by simulating the action of each of the circuits with pencil and paper.

In the meantime, the rest of us, happy to have found something to keep Richard occupied, went about the business of ordering the furniture and computers, hiring the first engineers, and arranging for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to pay for the development of the first prototype. Richard did a remarkable job of focusing on his "assignment," stopping only occasionally to help wire the computer room, set up the machine shop, shake hands with the investors, install the telephones, and cheerfully remind us of how crazy we all were. When we finally picked the name of the company, Thinking Machines Corporation, Richard was delighted. "That's good. Now I don't have to explain to people that I work with a bunch of loonies. I can just tell them the name of the company."

The technical side of the project was definitely stretching our capacities. We had decided to simplify things by starting with only 64,000 processors, but even then the amount of work to do was overwhelming. We had to design our own silicon integrated circuits, with processors and a router. We also had to invent packaging and cooling mechanisms, write compilers and assemblers, devise ways of testing processors simultaneously, and so on. Even simple problems like wiring the boards together took on a whole new meaning when working with tens of thousands of processors. In retrospect, if we had had any understanding of how complicated the project was going to be, we never would have started.

'Get These Guys Organized'

I had never managed a large group before and I was clearly in over my head. Richard volunteered to help out. "We've got to get these guys organized," he told me. "Let me tell you how we did it at Los Alamos."

Every great man that I have known has had a certain time and place in their life that they use as a reference point; a time when things worked as they were supposed to and great things were accomplished. For Richard, that time was at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Whenever things got "cockeyed," Richard would look back and try to understand how now was different than then. Using this approach, Richard decided we should pick an expert in each area of importance in the machine, such as software or packaging or electronics, to become the "group leader" in this area, analogous to the group leaders at Los Alamos.

Part Two of Feynman's "Let's Get Organized" campaign was that we should begin a regular seminar series of invited speakers who might have interesting things to do with our machine. Richard's idea was that we should concentrate on people with new applications, because they would be less conservative about what kind of computer they would use. For our first seminar he invited John Hopfield, a friend of his from CalTech, to give us a talk on his scheme for building neural networks. In 1983, studying neural networks was about as fashionable as studying ESP, so some people considered John Hopfield a little bit crazy. Richard was certain he would fit right in at Thinking Machines Corporation.

What Hopfield had invented was a way of constructing an [associative memory], a device for remembering patterns. To use an associative memory, one trains it on a series of patterns, such as pictures of the letters of the alphabet. Later, when the memory is shown a new pattern it is able to recall a similar pattern that it has seen in the past. A new picture of the letter "A" will "remind" the memory of another "A" that it has seen previously. Hopfield had figured out how such a memory could be built from devices that were similar to biological neurons.

Not only did Hopfield's method seem to work, but it seemed to work well on the Connection Machine. Feynman figured out the details of how to use one processor to simulate each of Hopfield's neurons, with the strength of the connections represented as numbers in the processors' memory. Because of the parallel nature of Hopfield's algorithm, all of the processors could be used concurrently with 100\% efficiency, so the Connection Machine would be hundreds of times faster than any conventional computer.

An Algorithm For Logarithms

Feynman worked out the program for computing Hopfield's network on the Connection Machine in some detail. The part that he was proudest of was the subroutine for computing logarithms. I mention it here not only because it is a clever algorithm, but also because it is a specific contribution Richard made to the mainstream of computer science. He invented it at Los Alamos.

Consider the problem of finding the logarithm of a fractional number between 1.0 and 2.0 (the algorithm can be generalized without too much difficulty). Feynman observed that any such number can be uniquely represented as a product of numbers of the form $1 + 2^{-k]$, where $k$ is an integer. Testing each of these factors in a binary number representation is simply a matter of a shift and a subtraction. Once the factors are determined, the logarithm can be computed by adding together the precomputed logarithms of the factors. The algorithm fit especially well on the Connection Machine, since the small table of the logarithms of $1 + 2^{-k]$ could be shared by all the processors. The entire computation took less time than division.

Concentrating on the algorithm for a basic arithmetic operation was typical of Richard's approach. He loved the details. In studying the router, he paid attention to the action of each individual gate and in writing a program he insisted on understanding the implementation of every instruction. He distrusted abstractions that could not be directly related to the facts. When several years later I wrote a general interest article on the Connection Machine for [Scientific American], he was disappointed that it left out too many details. He asked, "How is anyone supposed to know that this isn't just a bunch of crap?"

Feynman's insistence on looking at the details helped us discover the potential of the machine for numerical computing and physical simulation. We had convinced ourselves at the time that the Connection Machine would not be efficient at "number-crunching," because the first prototype had no special hardware for vectors or floating point arithmetic. Both of these were "known" to be requirements for number-crunching. Feynman decided to test this assumption on a problem that he was familiar with in detail: quantum chromodynamics.

Quantum chromodynamics is a theory of the internal workings of atomic particles such as protons. Using this theory it is possible, in principle, to compute the values of measurable physical quantities, such as a proton's mass. In practice, such a computation requires so much arithmetic that it could keep the fastest computers in the world busy for years. One way to do this calculation is to use a discrete four-dimensional lattice to model a section of space-time. Finding the solution involves adding up the contributions of all of the possible configurations of certain matrices on the links of the lattice, or at least some large representative sample. (This is essentially a Feynman path integral.) The thing that makes this so difficult is that calculating the contribution of even a single configuration involves multiplying the matrices around every little loop in the lattice, and the number of loops grows as the fourth power of the lattice size. Since all of these multiplications can take place concurrently, there is plenty of opportunity to keep all 64,000 processors busy.

To find out how well this would work in practice, Feynman had to write a computer program for QCD. Since the only computer language Richard was really familiar with was Basic, he made up a parallel version of Basic in which he wrote the program and then simulated it by hand to estimate how fast it would run on the Connection Machine.

He was excited by the results. "Hey Danny, you're not going to believe this, but that machine of yours can actually do something [useful]!" According to Feynman's calculations, the Connection Machine, even without any special hardware for floating point arithmetic, would outperform a machine that CalTech was building for doing QCD calculations. From that point on, Richard pushed us more and more toward looking at numerical applications of the machine.

By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the number of 1's" with respect to time. Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.

The decision to ignore Feynman's analysis was made in September, but by next spring we were up against a wall. The chips that we had designed were slightly too big to manufacture and the only way to solve the problem was to cut the number of buffers per chip back to five. Since Feynman's equations claimed we could do this safely, his unconventional methods of analysis started looking better and better to us. We decided to go ahead and make the chips with the smaller number of buffers.

Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the chips the machine worked. The first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life.

Cellular Automata

The game of Life is an example of a class of computations that interested Feynman called [cellular automata]. Like many physicists who had spent their lives going to successively lower and lower levels of atomic detail, Feynman often wondered what was at the bottom. One possible answer was a cellular automaton. The notion is that the "continuum" might, at its lowest levels, be discrete in both space and time, and that the laws of physics might simply be a macro-consequence of the average behavior of tiny cells. Each cell could be a simple automaton that obeys a small set of rules and communicates only with its nearest neighbors, like the lattice calculation for QCD. If the universe in fact worked this way, then it presumably would have testable consequences, such as an upper limit on the density of information per cubic meter of space.

The notion of cellular automata goes back to von Neumann and Ulam, whom Feynman had known at Los Alamos. Richard's recent interest in the subject was motivated by his friends Ed Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram, both of whom were fascinated by cellular automata models of physics. Feynman was always quick to point out to them that he considered their specific models "kooky," but like the Connection Machine, he considered the subject sufficiently crazy to put some energy into.

There are many potential problems with cellular automata as a model of physical space and time; for example, finding a set of rules that obeys special relativity. One of the simplest problems is just making the physics so that things look the same in every direction. The most obvious pattern of cellular automata, such as a fixed three-dimensional grid, have preferred directions along the axes of the grid. Is it possible to implement even Newtonian physics on a fixed lattice of automata?

Feynman had a proposed solution to the anisotropy problem which he attempted (without success) to work out in detail. His notion was that the underlying automata, rather than being connected in a regular lattice like a grid or a pattern of hexagons, might be randomly connected. Waves propagating through this medium would, on the average, propagate at the same rate in every direction.

Cellular automata started getting attention at Thinking Machines when Stephen Wolfram, who was also spending time at the company, suggested that we should use such automata not as a model of physics, but as a practical method of simulating physical systems. Specifically, we could use one processor to simulate each cell and rules that were chosen to model something useful, like fluid dynamics. For two-dimensional problems there was a neat solution to the anisotropy problem since [Frisch, Hasslacher, Pomeau] had shown that a hexagonal lattice with a simple set of rules produced isotropic behavior at the macro scale. Wolfram used this method on the Connection Machine to produce a beautiful movie of a turbulent fluid flow in two dimensions. Watching the movie got all of us, especially Feynman, excited about physical simulation. We all started planning additions to the hardware, such as support of floating point arithmetic that would make it possible for us to perform and display a variety of simulations in real time.

Feynman the Explainer

In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this,

"We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids."

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. "Don't say `reflected acoustic wave.' Say [echo]." Or, "Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Just say there's a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out." Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.

Getting Richard to give advice like that was sometimes tricky. He pretended not to like working on any problem that was outside his claimed area of expertise. Often, at Thinking Machines when he was asked for advice he would gruffly refuse with "That's not my department." I could never figure out just what his department was, but it did not matter anyway, since he spent most of his time working on those "not-my-department" problems. Sometimes he really would give up, but more often than not he would come back a few days after his refusal and remark, "I've been thinking about what you asked the other day and it seems to me..." This worked best if you were careful not to expect it.

I do not mean to imply that Richard was hesitant to do the "dirty work." In fact, he was always volunteering for it. Many a visitor at Thinking Machines was shocked to see that we had a Nobel Laureate soldering circuit boards or painting walls. But what Richard hated, or at least pretended to hate, was being asked to give advice. So why were people always asking him for it? Because even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. And whatever he understood, he could make others understand as well. Richard made people feel like a child does, when a grown-up first treats him as an adult. He was never afraid of telling the truth, and however foolish your question was, he never made you feel like a fool.

The charming side of Richard helped people forgive him for his uncharming characteristics. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." That was the essence of Richard's charm.

A Kind Of Game

Richard worked at the company on and off for the next five years. Floating point hardware was eventually added to the machine, and as the machine and its successors went into commercial production, they were being used more and more for the kind of numerical simulation problems that Richard had pioneered with his QCD program. Richard's interest shifted from the construction of the machine to its applications. As it turned out, building a big computer is a good excuse to talk to people who are working on some of the most exciting problems in science. We started working with physicists, astronomers, geologists, biologists, chemists --- everyone of them trying to solve some problem that it had never been possible to solve before. Figuring out how to do these calculations on a parallel machine requires understanding of the details of the application, which was exactly the kind of thing that Richard loved to do.

For Richard, figuring out these problems was a kind of a game. He always started by asking very basic questions like, "What is the simplest example?" or "How can you tell if the answer is right?" He asked questions until he reduced the problem to some essential puzzle that he thought he would be able to solve. Then he would set to work, scribbling on a pad of paper and staring at the results. While he was in the middle of this kind of puzzle solving he was impossible to interrupt. "Don't bug me. I'm busy," he would say without even looking up. Eventually he would either decide the problem was too hard (in which case he lost interest), or he would find a solution (in which case he spent the next day or two explaining it to anyone who listened). In this way he worked on problems in database searches, geophysical modeling, protein folding, analyzing images, and reading insurance forms.

The last project that I worked on with Richard was in simulated evolution. I had written a program that simulated the evolution of populations of sexually reproducing creatures over hundreds of thousands of generations. The results were surprising in that the fitness of the population made progress in sudden leaps rather than by the expected steady improvement. The fossil record shows some evidence that real biological evolution might also exhibit such "punctuated equilibrium," so Richard and I decided to look more closely at why it happened. He was feeling ill by that time, so I went out and spent the week with him in Pasadena, and we worked out a model of evolution of finite populations based on the Fokker Planck equations. When I got back to Boston I went to the library and discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my disappointment, all of our "discoveries" were covered in the first few pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was elated. "Hey, we got it right!" he said. "Not bad for amateurs."

In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress.

Telling The Good Stuff You Know

Actually, I doubt that it was "progress" that most interested Richard. He was always searching for patterns, for connections, for a new way of looking at something, but I suspect his motivation was not so much to understand the world as it was to find new ideas to explain. The act of discovery was not complete for him until he had taught it to someone else.

I remember a conversation we had a year or so before his death, walking in the hills above Pasadena. We were exploring an unfamiliar trail and Richard, recovering from a major operation for the cancer, was walking more slowly than usual. He was telling a long and funny story about how he had been reading up on his disease and surprising his doctors by predicting their diagnosis and his chances of survival. I was hearing for the first time how far his cancer had progressed, so the jokes did not seem so funny. He must have noticed my mood, because he suddenly stopped the story and asked, "Hey, what's the matter?"

I hesitated. "I'm sad because you're going to die."

"Yeah," he sighed, "that bugs me sometimes too. But not so much as you think." And after a few more steps, "When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway."

We walked along in silence for a few minutes. Then we came to a place where another trail crossed and Richard stopped to look around at the surroundings. Suddenly a grin lit up his face. "Hey," he said, all trace of sadness forgotten, "I bet I can show you a better way home."

And so he did.