Monday, January 8, 2007
Dear Johnny
I will be presenting a conference session at the upcoming O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in March. Nobody I've spoken with in the past five years will be surprised to find out that the conference session will focus on a sub-genre of computational modeling called Cellular Automata.
As part of my ongoing obsession with the field, I recently spent an afternoon in the Manuscript Reading Room at our hometown library, where thirty-four boxes of papers, letters, manuscripts, notebooks, and speeches from the grandfather of this field may be found. Of particular interest to me were a decade worth of correspondence between Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann.
Wow.
John von Neumann died in 1957, and left this field largely unexplored in favor of his other pursuits (game theory, economics, computers, and bombs). Also within the 34 boxes of papers were his manuscript on cellular automata (published posthumously in a heavily edited form as part of Theory of Self-Replicating Automata).
Subsequent decades saw huge advances in this field, but for a few hours last Thursday, I was there at the beginning. And the way it began was with a hand-scrawled letter from Stanislaw Ulam to John von Neumann, that began like this:
As part of my ongoing obsession with the field, I recently spent an afternoon in the Manuscript Reading Room at our hometown library, where thirty-four boxes of papers, letters, manuscripts, notebooks, and speeches from the grandfather of this field may be found. Of particular interest to me were a decade worth of correspondence between Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann.
Wow.
John von Neumann died in 1957, and left this field largely unexplored in favor of his other pursuits (game theory, economics, computers, and bombs). Also within the 34 boxes of papers were his manuscript on cellular automata (published posthumously in a heavily edited form as part of Theory of Self-Replicating Automata).
Subsequent decades saw huge advances in this field, but for a few hours last Thursday, I was there at the beginning. And the way it began was with a hand-scrawled letter from Stanislaw Ulam to John von Neumann, that began like this:
Dear Johnny,
¶ 3:17 PM
