Young Von Neumann Encounters Punched Cards

[beamjockey]

In addition to his work on pure mathematics, John von Neumann contributed fundamental advances to dozens of fields, from quantum mechanics to weather prediction. In particular, he was a pivotal figure in the development of electronic digital computers.

I've been reading George Dyson's terrific book Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital

Comments

[mmcirvin]

Von Neumann's work on self-replicators in cellular automata was sometime in the late 1940s, though I think much of it wasn't published until the Sixties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_constructor

I assume that von Neumann was thinking of the thing as a rough analogue of a living replicator. He designed it as a universal computer using a long "tape" as its program, and it'd copy the tape and run the rest of the program to build another one of itself.

More recently, people have played around with actual implementations of von Neumann's replicator, and also with various kinds of constructor in Conway Life. One of the more interesting realizations in recent years is that, for at least the lion's share of the process, you maybe can get away with much much less than a Turing machine: a simple tape-driven mechanism more like a Jacquard loom or a player piano is enough. It's sort of come full circle. I discussed a not-quite-replicator in Life here (not quite a replicator because it doesn't copy the "DNA"):

http://mmcirvin.livejournal.com/458266.html