October 2011
3 posts
Guy Steele on the future of computing
Two hundred years from now we will have decided that computers aren’t interesting, that they are really boring, and we will move on to something else. It will just be a technology in the background like refrigeration technology now.
This quote by Guy Steele comes from the panel discussion at the end of Don Knuth’s Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About.
Manuela Veloso on empathy for robots
Manuela Veloso is an AI and robotics researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who did a lot of work with soccer-playing robots.
I often see people who look at my soccer-playing Sony dog robots being literally moved by those little machines. When I am giving a big technical explanation, saying that the robot is a mechanical thing in which you can switch the legs, press a button, and put another...
Don Knuth on "purpose"
As I was designing a chip for a very simple RISC computer, I was surprised to find that the easiest and somehow the best way to design this chip was to have it doing all kinds of things that would never be needed afterwards. I mean, two binary numbers were input to the chip at each clock cycle, and the adder would add them and the subtracter would simultaneously subtract them, and the multiplier...