Elf Sternberg

I'll never regret asking this long-shot request on HN -- thanks to Harold Ancell and Marvin Minsky:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161002

>DonHopkins on Sept 2, 2015 | parent | context | favorite | on: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy –...

>I remember running across a Turing machine emulator implemented in TECO in Minsky's home directory that I'd REALLY love to get ahold of.

>hga on Sept 2, 2015 [–]

>Ask and yea shall receive:

MSG: APL 1
DISTRIB: *BBOARD
EXPIRES: 03/17/81 23:08:54
MINSKY@MIT-MC 03/11/81 23:08:54 Re: too-short programs

APL is compact, I suppose. So is TECO. When I wrote the following
Universal Turing Machine, which works, I actually understood it.

[ I've interpolated the non-printing characters as displayed by (Gnu) EMACS,
escape is ^], ^^ is one character, as is \356: ]

i1Aul qq+^^0:iqm^[29iiq\356y0L1 00L1 11L2 A1L1
y0L1 0yR2 1AR2 AyR6 yyL3 00L0 1AL3 A1L4 yyL4 0yR5 11L7 A1L4
yyR5 0yL3 1AR5 A1R5 yyR6 0AL3 1AR6 A1R6 y0R7 0yR6 11R7 A0R2
^[j<sR^[;-d-2ciql-^^^[ci"ed^^^[cii^[ciuq'^[>
j<sL^[;-d-2ciql-^^^[ci"ed^^^[cii-2c^[ciuq'^[>jxblx1lx2lx3lx4lx5lx6lx7hk
iyyAyyAyy^[32<i0^[>ji110101110000010011011^[ 1uq<htmbqq=>

I do not advise attempting to understand this code, which is
almost as bad as that for the Universal Turing machine.

>ADDED: or http://ancell-ent.com/share/minsky-TECO-turing-machine.txt

>Please ack receipt of this and/or send me email (in my HN…

The story of "Feynman vs The Abacus" can be read here: [1]

While it's a great story and is very entertainingly written, as is typical of Feynman, I don't think he was being very fair to the merits of the two approaches to mental math -- his own vs that of the soroban.

Feynman clearly hadn't done any research on the merits of the soroban method, he just had this single run in with a random soroban salesman. From this one experience, and without very much thought on the subject, he just kind of dismisses the method almost out of hand. Such offhand dismissals are unfortunately also pretty typical of Feynman regarding subjects he is mostly ignorant of and has little experience with (such as his dismissals of philosophy in other talks).

In the story, the random soroban salesman, who clearly hasn't even very much proficiency with the soroban (as evidenced by his need for a physical soroban, vs soroban-trained practitioners who no longer need the physical device but can apply the soroban methods in their head) is matched against one of the greatest physicists in history, a Physics Nobel Prize winner who has advanced math training. That's really not a fair match.

It would have been great to see how Feynman would have fared against someone like this guy: [2] or against one of the national soroban competition winners, or against a top mathematician or physicist who was soroban-trained. That would be a fairer match and the results more indicative of the merits of the two…

This reminds me of the story of Feynman beating the abacist

http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html

However, the correct Portuguese for "cube roots" is "raízes cúbicas", not "raios cubicos"(—edited with thanks to JetSpiegel for the correction!). I've thought that Feynman may have been better at speaking Portuguese than at spelling it, or that most of Surely You're Joking may have been transcribed from tapes by Ralph Leighton, who probably didn't speak Portuguese.)

Edit: Also, I was partly inspired to learn Portuguese by Richard Feynman. I didn't imagine that that would lead to complaining about his spelling. :-)

> this goes so quickly

Many people don't realize how fast it is to work on abacus (or soroban in Japanese). Here is an example of what a 7 year old can do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQtqlB-jXO0

For many years I always did my taxes and other accounting using an abacus because it was sooo much easier than longhand (this was before calculators).

There is the famous Feynman story as well:

https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html

But you wouldn't impress an ancient Greek very much by taking cube roots quickly because there wouldn't be much call for that.

That IBM ad at the end is priceless on so many levels.
(What did that massive computer do? How many female engineers do you count... etc,)

Thanks for the article. My grandfather was an accountant who preferred the slide rule to a calculator. I grew up with slide rules around me, and never could understand the logic.

Another tool lost in the past generation is the Abacus (here is a great story with Feynman[1]) and I would love more info as to how those compared in logic or use, if anyone can shed insight.

[1]: https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html

I disagree with only 1 way to write programs in Go.

Go is not an old Fortran (see [1] about "the only real structure is an array") so there is always choice between array-of-structures and structure-of-arrays.

[1] https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html

Haskell (and C++ for that matter) can hide the difference with associated types (and templates).

PS
Speaking about arrays - I once read Go's specification for some obscure fun and realized that I read a third of it and still am reading about arrays and stuff and not about programming.