The Computing Disease

My iPod has been getting a real workout lately. I’ve been getting into podcasts and audible books. I’ve never seem to make the time to read paper books anymore and when I do I always manage to fall asleep after a few paragraphs so listening to them instead works well out particularly for me.

The current book is The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by my all-time favourite physicist (yes I have a favourite), Richard P. Feynman. I’ve always liked Feynman, mainly because his approach to life and learning seems to fit with my ideal – not necessarily reflected in reality but I do try.

Over the years I’ve read a number of his books, papers and lectures etc. and he always seems to have such a great outlook on life, learning, love, you name it. IMHO, a man with his head screwed on just right. I especially like his lectures on physics and his thoughts on computing. He has a way of making difficult material accessible to the likes of yours-truly.

Among many other things, Feynman states that knowlegde without understanding is pretty much a waste of time; the idea that just being able to perform some function or know the name of something without undertsanding what you are doing or the nature of that something, is not only pointless but inefficient and makes you largely ineffective. A subject that is very close to my heart also.

Yesterday I was listening to one of his talks on his time at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project. He was talking about how they developed sophisticated – even by today’s standards – algorithms for utilising many computers – adding and multiplying machines – in parallell. The problem was that although they had ordered a number of IBM machines, it would be sometime before the machines would arrive and even then they woudl need to be assembled. In the meantime they decided to start writing and debugging their programs. To do this, they enlisted the help of a group of women to act as the adders and multipliers – like a typing pool only performing calculations instead. Amusingly, because of the way the algorithms worked and because of the state of technology at that time, the women managed to process the data as fast as the machines could. The only problem was that the women got tired and needed sleep, food, etc.

Anyway, in all this, Feynman makes a great quote which tickled my fancy:

There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you ‘play’ with them! - Richard P. Feynman

Of course we all prefer to call it “innovation” ;-) but at least it’s nice to see that the phenomenon isn’t a recent one – apparently even the great Von Neumann was afflicted.