moon traveller herald

   On 100th anniversary of his birth - Claude Shannon was born in Petoskey, Mich., and grew up in Gaylord, Mich. He worked as a messenger for Western Union while in Gaylord High School, and attended college at MIT, where he was a member of Tau Beta Pi. Although the algebra of digital binary bits was first uncovered by mathematician George Boole in the mid-19th century, it was Shannon who saw the value of applying that form of logic to electronic communications. As a student of Vannevar Bush's at MIT in the 1930s, he worked on the differential analyzer, perhaps the greatest mechanical (analog) calculator. His paper, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits," which led to a long association with Bell Laboratories, laid out Shannon's theories on the relationship of symbolic logic and relay circuits.... When I was young, Shannon's work was a tough nut to crack, but it certainly was intriguing. As a high school boy, I was interested in the future ...

Everyonce and a while I pull something over from a former blog. Here is such an occassion..bunch of notes on Cyber. Wiener - The efforts of Norbert Wiener’s biographers always will be shadowed by I Am a Mathematician. This, his own biography, is likely to overwhelm other attempts to write his story - He was able as a writer, engaging personally, and he ably perceived threads of significance as he viewed his own life. A fair helping of subdued vanity aside, the threading never seems overstressed. This is important because, on the face of it, Wiener’s work, which ranged from estimations of Brownian motion to artillery shell trajectories and beyond may appear disparate, even topsy-turvy, in the light of history. Wiener’s life was both blessed and vexed by the fact of his prodigiousness, which he handled in greater depth in another autobiographical installment. As much as he finally was to become the iconic image of the absent minded professor, he had a grounding in real life. That, he ...

Work in progress (this draws from other posts). Hello Claude - In 1939, graduate student Claude Shannon would describe himself as working "off and on" on analysis of fundamental properties of systems for the transmission of intelligence - that, in a note to his teacher, Vannevar Bush of M.I.T.  At the school in a basement, Shannon had helped run Bush's general-purpose Differential Analyzer, an acme of sorts in the evolution of the mechanical analog computer. His master's thesis was on symbolic analysis of switching circuits. Somewhere along the way he latched on to the germ of something that was intrinsic to both analog and what came to be digital communication. Shannon held dual undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics from the University of Michigan. It was probably a rare happenstance that there he'd studied the algebra of George Boole, which may have given him a unique view toward what would become digital logic after the transis...

I was reading about Alan Turing last night, after going to see some good music (Mark Schlack and his John Paine All Stars). I wanted to refer to Claude Shannon, and recalled an obit/appreciation I wrote for ITWorld when he died. It was hard to find... so I am fair using it in great part here just in case and for reference. ... Shannon was born in Petoskey, Mich., and grew up in Gaylord, Mich. He worked as a messenger for Western Union while in Gaylord High School, and attended college at MIT, where he was a member of Tau Beta Pi. Although the algebra of digital binary bits was first uncovered by mathematician George Boole in the mid-19th century, it was Shannon who saw the value of applying that form of logic to electronic communications. As a student of Vannevar Bush's at MIT in the 1930s, he worked on the differential analyzer, perhaps the greatest mechanical (analog) calculator. His paper, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits," which led to a l...

BLUES   |   DRBOPMOG   |   POESY   |   DERACINATION   |   ELECTRONIC BARD SYSTEM Bombe. Important gears in the machine of the history of computing are sometimes connected, sometimes disconnected. The British Government created one of the biggest disconnects by burying its own pioneering World War II work behind curtains of information classification. The Government shielded details of their war time work on the electromechanical Bombe computer and the Bombe-related programmable electronic Colossus* computer far past the time when these systems' underlying mechanisms were well known.  This resulted in a dark veil dropping over much of the work of Alan Turing, who studied at Cambridge and Princeton and who was a tremendously significant figure in Bombe and the ACE stored-program computer. People close to the story were well aware of Turing, however. Turing is the subject of "The Man Who Knew Too Much- Alan Turing...

 A rewrite My Secret Museum of Cybernetics i. Intellectual pretensions were welcome around my house growing up in Racine. I got a job at an after-school job at the library, and found  a book for every imagining I might have. At the point where Bob Dylan and Summer of Love mysticism was passing cars and rockets in my personal hit parade, I chanced upon the notion of feedback. It had a scientific aspect and a musical aspect [the latter in the hands of Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground and Canned Heat]. I was assigned to write a thesis that could serve as an essay for college admission. So I had a mind to study. With Bronski's Science and Human Values in hand I began a piece on The Humanization of Science, in part a Renaissance study. In part a look at the history of alchemy. I'd often begin at the beginning of things and hardly get any further. At the same time I found out about Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon - about cybernetics and information theory. Cybernetics, closely...

@JackIVaughan: Silk corn husk Ruby corn beads Sprout from the earth Send message to heaven http://t.co/S496B3m8QT Reading Player Piano. And remembering the factory cybernetic. When I worked the Paste Wax line at Johnson's, we placed the lids on the cans (two of us) by hand. It could well have been the oldest line in the old factory. With so much cybernation around, it seemed primitive - something that could be automated. And I would look at the other lines (the Jubilee line with its ear shattering glass jostling was adjacent) and wonder how. Earl, the engineer, I remember him now in crew cut, white short sleeve shirt, tie, glasses and pocket protector, would come by and eye the process as well. When I worked the line. The day Pedro did not come back from lunch. To come. When I worked the line: they would pump-in Muzak. Then by syndicated radio. Once a week, in some alternating pattern related to pay day: "Whstle While you Work." One day, another s...

We worry about the machines taking over, therefore we are. But the flying machines of cyborgdom that plummet down the cliff still out pace the Roombas - and Orek and Hoover are not shaking at the thought of the Roomba. Those who have read the accounts of the Dartmouth Conference, and who credit it as a starting point for a new look at machines, generally know too that it finally lead to dissolution. In 1956, Marvin Minksy, Claude Shannon, John McCarthy and others gathered at the Ivy League school and started the long formal trek to Artificial Intelligence [AI], although machine intelligent may be the better term. Kubrik’s movie 2001, much more than is posthumous film, AI, gave artificial life to some heady machine notions, but after Cambridge’s AI Alley [a home for several commercial ventures aimed at harnessing young AI] went sour, the AI egg had a great fall. Fuzzy logic and Neural Nets did not carry the baton much further. The intelligence of a three-year-old human is still an elus...