Couldn't really finish it, but it reminded me that life is short and that there are a lot more fun things out there to do and think about than yet another business app: Stories, Art, the intersection of fantasy and reality.
The presentation was, indeed, outstanding.
The content was half-a-click above 'meh'. Honestly, were there any ideas here that you don't think were common knowledge to the average HN reader?
I suspect it is the very rare average HN reader who has spent any time this morning idly wondering whether a computer built out of matchboxes to play Go would be bigger or smaller than the Crab Nebula.
Really? I first came across the matchbox tic-tac-toe concept in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column as a teenager, and the first thing I did was some back-of-the-envelope calculations on how many boxes would be required for chess. If I recall, it was larger than the number of atoms in the universe.
Are you suggesting that novel-idea-density is the average HN reader's sole metric for measuring content? You might be right. I certainly fall into that rut more often than I'd like. I suspect it gives me a dopamine rush.
I liked this piece for the interesting historical miscellany that it pulled together, and for the narrative and visualization on scales of complexity. It got bonus points for including A Humument, which I bought back when I was going through a Douglas Hofstadter phase. (He mentioned it in Metamagical Themas.)
> "which first counted normally in some series, such as addition by 2—“0... 2... 4... 6...”—until they grew restless, when it would suddenly add not 2, but 74, or 117, or some other, defiantly not-2 number."
is this because it was in fact computing a different but intended function, or was it a random bug? and was it a bug intentionally added by babbage or inexplicable?
i'm trying to figure out what the below quote means
> "This, claimed Babbage, represented the sudden, miraculous change—reality was pre-programmed with unexpected events which demonstrated the changing will of God."
I found the article very fun and interesting. Mixing print-outs with drawings of which pictures are taken to be the images in the article was a nice twist.
