Neil Gershenfeld

I learned why von Neumann and Turing made fundamental mistakes

I learned the secret of life.

I learned how to solve many of the world's most important problems, which all sound presumptuous, but all of those are things I learned at that boundary.

So I worked with Andy Gleason, who was Turing's counterpart.

So just for background, if anybody doesn't know, Turing is credited with the modern architecture of computing.

among many other things.

Andy Gleason was his US counterpart.

And you might not have heard of Andy Gleason, but you might have heard of the Hilbert problems.

And Andy Gleason solved the fifth one.

So he was a really notable mathematician.

During the war, he was Turing's counterpart.

Then von Neumann is credited with the modern architecture of computing.

And one of his students was Marvin Minsky.

So I could ask Marvin what Johnny was thinking, and I could ask Andy what Alan was thinking.

And what came out from that, what I came to appreciate as background, I never understood the difference between computer science and physical science.

But Turing's machine, that's the foundation of modern computing, has a simple physics mistake.

which is the head is distinct from the tape.

So in the Turing machine, there's a head that programmatically moves and reads and writes a tape.

The head is distinct from the tape, which means persistence of information is separate from interaction with information.

Then von Neumann wrote deeply and beautifully about many things, but not computing.