Pdf first draft of a report on the edvac project
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it This work is in the public domain in the United States of America and possibly other nations Within the United States you may freely copy and distribute this work as no entity individual or corporate has a copyright on the body of the work Scholars believe and we concur that this work is important enough to be preserved reproduced and made generally available to the public To ensure a quality reading experience this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy to read typeface We appreciate your support of the preservation process and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant First Draft of a Report on the EDVACNot into John von Neumann but I read this to explore the origins of the brain is a computer metaphor common in both neuroscience and many people s conception of it In this tract he lays out the foundation for one of the first digital computers commissioned for missile and radar systems I believe and describes logic gates and what is now called the von Neumann architecture now both of which are used in every common computer today. First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC kindle unlimited His model of computational logic was directly based on a metaphor of how neurons work There are multiple brain derived metaphors throughout the paper including referring to input as stimuli a whole section explaining how binary computation is a simplified version of neuronal firing clocks in computers being like synaptic delay and the one most people are familiar with still memory The only citation in it is of work by McCulloch and Pitts who made one of the early mathematical models of neuronal function. Kindle First Draft of a Report on the edvac full Unless it s related to a general idea of computing the metaphor of brains being computers is kind of a tautology as computers were inspired by brains Computing before computers was also something people did and it wasn t the only thing they did so the metaphor seems to be defining something by a sub process of that thing First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC This is a very cool read even 68 years later and computers as common as dust Von Neumann s approach to defining computers is completely different from anything I ve ever seen current architecture papers He treats them as living organisms than as boolean hardware It s actually a very fast and somewhat light read First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC
John von Neumann Hungarian margittai Neumann J nos Lajos was a Hungarian American 1 mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields 2 including set theory functional analysis quantum mechanics ergodic theory continuous geometry economics and game theory computer science numerical analysis hydrodynamics of explosions and statistics as well as many other mathematical fields He is generally regarded as one of the foremost mathematicians of the 20th century The mathematician Jean Dieudonn called von Neumann the last of the great mathematicians Even in Budapest in the time that produced Szil rd 1898 Wigner 1902 and Teller 1908 his brilliance stood out Most notably von Neumann was a pioneer John von Neumann Hungarian margittai Neumann J nos Lajos was a Hungarian American 1 mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields 2 including set theory functional analysis quantum mechanics ergodic theory continuous geometry economics and game theory computer science numerical analysis hydrodynamics of explosions and statistics as well as many other mathematical fields He is generally regarded as one of the foremost mathematicians of the 20th century The mathematician Jean Dieudonn called von Neumann the last of the great mathematicians Even in Budapest in the time that produced Szil rd 1898 Wigner 1902 and Teller 1908 his brilliance stood out Most notably von Neumann was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics a principal member of the Manhattan Project and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as one of the few originally appointed and a key figure in the development of game theory and the concepts of cellular automata and the universal constructor Along with Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam von Neumann worked out key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb site_link.
