Abstract
One day in the spring of 1983, 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. (I was at the time a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab). His reaction was unequivocal: “That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.” For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to 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.
Keywords
Feynman diagramConnection (principal bundle)Computer scienceSpring (device)Mathematics educationArtificial intelligenceMathematicsEngineeringMathematical physicsMechanical engineering
Related Publications
RATIONALITY AS PROCESS AND AS PRODUCT OF THOUGHT
The opportunity to deliver the Richard T. Ely Lecture, from which this chapter is derived, afforded me some very personal satisfactions. Ely, unbeknownst to him, bore a great re...
Feynman Lectures on Computation
"When, in 1984-86, Richard P. Feynman gave his famous course on computation at the California Institute of Technology, he asked Tony Hey to adapt his lecture notes into a book. ...
An Analysis of Conflicting Social Norms
T HIS PAPER illustrates an empirical procedure for studying role obligations, with particular reference to simultaneous role obligations which conflict. The writer became especi...
Disturbing the universe
Spanning the years from World War II, when he was a civilian statistician in the operations research section of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command, through his studies with Hans...
Quantum Correlations and Secret Bits
It is shown that (i) all entangled states can be mapped by single-copy measurements into probability distributions containing secret correlations, and (ii) if a probability dist...
Publication Info
- Year
- 1989
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 42
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 78-83
- Citations
- 17
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Altmetric
PlumX Metrics
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
17
OpenAlex
Cite This
W. Daniel Hillis
(1989).
Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine.
Physics Today
, 42
(2)
, 78-83.
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.881196
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1063/1.881196