Talk:W. Daniel Hillis

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[edit] Connection Machines and Los Alamos

I don't want to edit this article but hopefully someone will correct some errors in light of the point I now make. I am just offering some memories here, ones that contradict the article as written. I was at Los Alamos in the early 90's and we had several Connection Machines. The CM-2 morphed into the CM-200, both of which had 64,000 bitwise processors. I think maybe the upgrade (from CM-2 to CM-200) was done by increasing the clock speed. I remember people saying that the upgrade would be done with a screwdriver and nothing else. The CM-2/200 a little set of cubes with flashing lights on the side and the whole gizmo was a few feet on a side. The next big TMC machine we got was called the CM-5 and consisted of 1,024 sparc chips. On the card for each chip were 4 vector units (VUs). Without the VUs the machine had a maximum peak theoretical performance of something like 1GFlop. WIth the VU's, peak theoretical performance on the CM-5 was 128GFlops. The CM-5 was physically much bigger than the CM-200. You could walk inside the CM-5. Oh yeah, I forgot, the CM-5's 1024 processors were floating point processors compared to the CM-2's 32,000 bitwise processors. The 5 had message passing unlike the 2. The 2 was way easier to program and way more elegant. I believe that Danny probably designed the CM-2 mainly by himself and that the CM-5 was probably designed by a committee. It was sort of a monstrosity. I think the CM-5 cost $15M. Anyway, to make a short story long the biggest cm did not have 64,000 processors it had 1,024.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 65.19.15.48 (talk • contribs) 19 March 2006. (note - an anon user, but probably not Danny --Zippy 23:21, 19 April 2006 (UTC))

Really interesting. If you ever feel the desire to edit the article, please go ahead. One thing to note is that Wikipedia articles should be based on verifiable info, so if you have any external links we can cite for the claims above, that would be a big help.

When you say walk inside the CM-5, do you mean walk between two of the (lightning-bolt shaped) cabinets, or do you mean walk inside a cabinet? I never saw the interior of a full CM-5, but if it was at all like a CM-5E, I think it would be a bit cramped inside. --Zippy 23:21, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] haha

One could easily portray Hillis’s interest in clock-building as a symptom of a mid-life crisis. After all, the older you get, the more interesting time seems to you. Perhaps, having failed to create real AI, the guy was reviewing his own life, and feeling his own death moving closer? Perhaps he found it comforting to remind himself how little it matters, from a 10,000 year viewpoint, whether any one human or any one company succeeds at doing any one thing? No doubt, there is an element of truth to this view. But this doesn’t seem to be a terribly large aspect of his motivation for pursuing the clock project – not as large, for example, as his sheer love of building cool stuff. And of course, both a thinking machine and a 10,000 year clock are Big Things – projects that appeal to the entrepreneurial, adventurous, overambitious soul.

absurd, and unabashedly pov.

Agreed. This definately has no place in an encyclopedia.

The two paragraphs preceeding it can also be construed as pov and are just wretched pieces of writing.

Among all his inventions, the clock is definitely one of the coolest – one that would make any MIT hacker proud. And it resonates with something deep and powerful in the human soul – the same aspect of human essence that finds the Cheops Pyramid more impressive than the Nintendo Game Boy, in spite of the incredible complexity of the hardware and software engineering involved in the latter. The Clock of the Long Now appeals to our embodiedness, to our embeddedness in space and time, whereas Hillis’s work on AI, like most AI work, ignored embodiedness and embeddedness and focused mainly on cognition, abstract thinking, on the most rarefied parts of the mind.

Abstractly, one could build a mind operating a thousand times faster than a human mind, or a thousand times slower. 10,000 years would mean something different to each of these differently time-scaled minds. But the mathematics and theory of AI would apply equally well to all of them, as would many of the same hardware engineering principles. The Clock of the Long Now is focused on palpable human reality, not the abstract mathematics of mind or the subtleties of hardware engineering. In fact it represents a step back from fancy modern electrical engineering. Modern technology provides few systems of 10,000-year durability, and so the design of the Clock of the Long Now required a number of purely engineering innovations.

I removed a few of the most POV paragraphs. Article is still not good, though. --Xyzzyplugh 21:50, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

• 1) -Wretched- writing? That's over-the-top; the paras above are no more "wretched" than Capra's or Hoffstadter's. I wonder if you are not all that familiar with the tone of writing for tech audiences in the past 20 years. 2) Why does the "tone of an encyclopedia article" have to stay the same as it's been for centuries? Furthermore, who says the "tone" of WP has to be consistent throughout (and ... perhaps ... adhere to your philosophy)? I have to agree with the comment below; stripping emotional POV strips humanity... as well as the sense of contemporaneousness this style conveys. WP is a people's work, it doesn't *have* to adhere to Molochian standards. -- Twang 7/9/2006

The article doesn't seem all that bad, but it didn't start as a neutral encyclopedia entry, but a sort of article-based biography, including evaluation and commentary.

I tried to remove some of the colloquialisms, expand on the Clock of the Long Now, and remove some of the commentary. The last section is perhaps the last of the non-encylopedic entries.  DavidDouthitt  (Talk) 21:53, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Be careful not to discard information just because it is has emotional pov. A large part of why people do things is due to emotion. I think the emotional layer in this article captures nicely Hillis' motivation behind why he does things, and therefore who he is. That can be extremely important information in a biographical entry.