Neil Gershenfeld

speaker

1,202 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2023 last heard May 2023

Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · 28 May 2023 podcast

But if the noise is below a threshold, for a linear increase in the energy representing our conversation, the error rate goes down exponentially.

Exponentials are fast.

There's very few of them in engineering.

And the exponential reduction of error below a threshold if you restore state is called a threshold theorem.

That's what led to digital.

That means unreliable things can work reliably.

So Shannon did that for communication.

Then von Neumann was inspired by that and applied it to computation.

And he showed how an unreliable computer can operate reliably by using the same threshold property of restoring state.

It was then forgotten many years.

We had to rediscover it in effect in the quantum computing era when things are very unreliable again.

But now to go back to how does this relate to the biggest things I've made?

So in fabrication, MIT invented computer-controlled manufacturing in 1952.

Jet aircraft were just emerging.

There was a limit to turning cranks on a milling machine to make parts for jet aircraft.

Now, this is a messy story.

MIT actually stole computer-controlled machining from an inventor who brought it to MIT, wanted to do a joint project with the Air Force, and MIT effectively stole it from him.

So it's kind of a messy history.

But

That sounds like the birth of computer controlled machining, 1952.

Showing 201–220 of 1,202 · page 11 of 61