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内容简介
“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same.
Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars.
How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.
媒体推荐
—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
“A fascinating combination of the technical and human stories behind the computing breakthroughs of the 1940s and ’50s . . . It demonstrates that the power of human thought often precedes determination and creativity in the birth of world-changing technology . . . An important work.”
—Richard DiDio, Philadelphia Inquirer
“Dyson’s book is not only learned, but brilliantly and surprisingly idiosyncratic and strange.”
—Josh Rothman, Braniac blog, Boston Globe
“Beyond the importance of this book as a contribution to the history of science, as a generalist I was struck by Dyson’s eye and ear for the delightfully entertaining detail . . . Turing’s Cathedral is suffused . . . with moments of insight, quirk and hilarity rendering it more than just a great book about science. It’s a great book, period.”
—Douglas Bell, The Globe and Mail
“The greatest strength of Turing’s Cathedral lies in its luscious wealth of anecdotal details about von Neumann and his band of scientific geniuses at IAS. Dyson himself is the son of Freeman Dyson, one of America’s greatest twentieth-century physicists and an IAS member from 1948 onward, and so Turing’s Cathedral is, in part, Dyson’s attempt to make both moral and intellectual sense of his father’s glittering and yet severely compromised scientific generation.”
—Andrew Keen, B&N Review
“A mesmerizing tale brilliantly told . . . . The use of wonderful quotes and pithy sketches of the brilliant cast of characters further enriches the text . . . . Meticulously researched and packed with not just technological details, but sociopolitical and cultural details as well—the definitive history of the computer.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“The most powerful technology of the last century was not the atomic bomb, but software—and both were invented by the same folks. Even as they were inventing it, the original geniuses imagined almost everything software has become since. At long last, George Dyson delivers the untold story of software’s creation. It is an amazing tale brilliantly deciphered.”
—Kevin Kelly, cofounder of WIRED magazine, author of What Technology Wants
“It is a joy to read George Dyson’s revelation of the very human story of the invention of the electronic computer, which he tells with wit, authority, and insight. Read Turing’s Cathedral as both the origin story of our digital universe and as a perceptive glimpse into its future.”
—W. Daniel Hillis, inventor of The Connection Machine, author of The Pattern on the Stone
作者简介
George Dyson is a historian of technology whose interests include the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak (Baidarka), the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications (Darwin Among the Machines), and the exploration of space (Project Orion).
文摘 Preface
POINT SOURCE SOLUTION
I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers.
—John von Neumann, 1946
There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky.
In late 1945, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Hungarian American mathematician John von Neumann gathered a small group of engineers to begin designing, building, and programming an electronic digital computer, with five kilobytes of storage, whose attention could be switched in 24 microseconds from one memory location to the next. The entire digital universe can be traced directly to this 32-by-32-by-40-bit nucleus: less memory than is allocated to displaying a single icon on a computer screen today.
Von Neumann’s project was the physical realization of Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, a theoretical construct invented in 1936. It was not the first computer. It was not even the second or third computer. It was, however, among the first computers to make full use of a high-speed random-access storage matrix, and became the machine whose coding was most widely replicated and whose logical architecture was most widely reproduced. The stored-program computer, as conceived by Alan Turing and delivered by John von Neumann, broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Our universe would never be the same.
Working outside the bounds of industry, breaking the rules of academia, and relying largely on the U.S. government for support, a dozen engineers in their twenties and thirties designed and built von Neumann’s computer for less than $1 million in under five years. “He was in the right place at the right time with the right connections with the right idea,” remembers Willis Ware, fourth to be hired to join the engineering team, “setting aside the hassle that will probably never be resolved as to whose ideas they really were.”
As World War II drew to a close, the scientists who had built the atomic bomb at Los Alamos wondered, “What’s next?” Some, including Richard Feynman, vowed never to have anything to do with nuclear weapons or military secrecy again. Others, including Edward Teller and John von Neumann, were eager to develop more advanced nuclear weapons, especially the “Super,” or hydrogen bomb. Just before dawn on the morning of July 16, 1945, the New Mexico desert was illuminated by an explosion “brighter than a thousand suns.” Eight and a half years later, an explosion one thousand times more powerful illuminated the skies over Bikini Atoll. The race to build the hydrogen bomb was accelerated by von Neumann’s desire to build a computer, and the push to build von Neumann’s computer was accelerated by the race to build a hydrogen bomb.
Computers were essential to the initiation of nuclear explosions, and to understanding what happens next. In “Point Source Solution,” a 1947 Los Alamos report on the shock waves produced by nuclear explosions, von Neumann explained that “for very violent explosions . . . it may be justified to treat the original, central, high pressure area as a point.” This approximated the physical reality of a nuclear explosion closely enough to enable some of the first useful predictions of weapons effects.
Numerical simulation of chain reactions within computers initiated a chain reaction among computers, with machines and codes proliferating as explosively as the phenomena they were designed to help us understand. It is no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time. Only the collective intelligence of computers could save us from the destructive powers of the weapons they had allowed us to invent.
Turing’s model of universal computation was one-dimensional: a string of symbols encoded on a tape. Von Neumann’s implementation of Turing’s model was two-dimensional: the address matrix underlying all computers in use today. The landscape is now three-dimensional, yet the entire Internet can still be viewed as a common tape shared by a multitude of Turing’s Universal Machines.
Where does time fit in? Time in the digital universe and time in our universe are governed by entirely different clocks. In our universe, time is a continuum. In a digital universe, time (T) is a countable number of discrete, sequential steps. A digital universe is bounded at the beginning, when T = 0, and at the end, if T comes to a stop. Even in a perfectly deterministic universe, there is no consistent method to predict the ending in advance. To an observer in our universe, the digital universe appears to be speeding up. To an observer in the digital universe, our universe appears to be slowing down.
Universal codes and universal machines, introduced by Alan Turing in his “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” of 1936, have prospered to such an extent that Turing’s underlying interest in the “decision problem” is easily overlooked. In answering the Entscheidungsproblem, Turing proved that there is no systematic way to tell, by looking at a code, what that code will do. That’s what makes the digital universe so interesting, and that’s what brings us here.
It is impossible to predict where the digital universe is going, but it is possible to understand how it began. The origin of the first fully electronic random-access storage matrix, and the propagation of the codes that it engendered, is as close to a point source as any approximation can get.
作者乔治·戴森简介编辑本段回目录
George Dyson (born 1953) is an author and historian of technology whose publications broadly cover the evolution of technology in relation to the physical environment and the direction of society. He has written on wide topics that include the history of computing, the development of algorithms and intelligence, communication systems, space exploration, and the design of water craft.
Lecturing widely at academic institutions, corporations, and high-tech conferences, Dyson gives a historical context to the evolution of technology in modern society and provides thought-provoking ideas on the directions in which technology, such as the Internet, might develop.
Dyson has been a visiting lecturer and research associate at Western Washington University's Fairhaven College and was Director’s Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2002-03. He is a frequent contributor to the Edge Foundation.
Early life
George Dyson is the son of the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson and mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, the brother of Esther Dyson, and the grandson of the British composer Sir George Dyson. When he was sixteen he went to live in British Columbia to pursue his interest in kayaking and escape his father's shadow. From 1972-1975, he lived in a treehouse at a height of 30 metres that he built from salvaged materials on the shore of Burrard Inlet. Dyson became a Canadian citizen and spent 20 years in British Columbia, designing kayaks, researching historic voyages and native peoples, and exploring the Inside Passage.
Career
He is the author of Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957-1965 and Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence, in which he expanded upon the premise of Samuel Butler's 1863 article of the same name and suggested coherently that the Internet is a living, sentient being. His book, Turing's Cathedral (2012), has been described as "a creation myth of the digital universe."
He is the subject of Kenneth Brower's 1978 book The Starship and the Canoe. Dyson was the founder of Dyson, Baidarka & Company, a designer of Aleut-style skin kayaks, and he is credited with the revival of the baidarka style of kayak.
Personal life
He lives and works in Bellingham, Washington, and is the father of Lauren Dyson.
Books
Baidarka the Kayak, 1986, Alaska Northwest Books, ISBN 0-88240-315-X
Darwin Among the Machines, 1997, Basic Books (USA) & Allan Lane Science (UK), ISBN 0-7382-0030-1
Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957-1965, 2002, Allan Lane Science, ISBN 0-7139-9267-0
Turing's Cathedral, 2012, Pantheon, ISBN 0-375-42277-3
乔治·戴森的父亲弗里曼·戴森（Freeman Dyson）是一位著名的科学家，退休前的大部分时间都在美国普林斯顿大学当教授。他可能是没有获得博士学位却在高等学术机构中任教的最著名的例子之一。乔治·戴森在充满学术气息的环境中经历了信息时代的发展，他在世界学术的中心近距离地感受了那些划时代的发明与发现。
在演讲中，乔治·戴森首先提到了“曼哈顿计划”。冯·诺伊曼在搞完原子弹之后说，他要搞一些比炸弹更重要的东西，那就是计算机。乔治·戴森介绍了比我们所熟知的“第一台计算机”ENIAC更早的机器，即MANIC。在演讲视频中，我们可以看到巨大原始硬盘，巨大的原始内存……在我们眼中，这些科学家都是严肃的冷冰冰的怪人。可是，我们可以从他们的工作日志里看到他们的涂鸦，看到他们调侃的语言。这些日志还记录了些有趣的事情，比如老鼠爬进了机器里。看看演讲吧，里面还有一些不太被人们记得的但对计算机的发展做出了贡献的人的故事。
图灵机和冯·诺伊曼结构是计算机诞生的两个重要的基石(顺便说一句，阿兰·图灵先生是一个同性恋)。在这里，我介绍几个好玩的模拟器，通过玩这些模拟器，大家可以非常直观地了解他们是什么东西。这些模拟器的页面上都有说明，大家照着玩就行了。这是图灵机的一个模拟器。这是冯·诺伊曼结构的模拟器。这是Edsac的一个模拟器，你可以下载并安装它。它的界面和1949－1951年的Edsac是一模一样的，你可以用这个模拟器感受一下当年使用那机器的感觉。Edsac是世界上第一台执行常规计算服务的存储程序计算机，在剑桥大学设计并制造，在1949年5月6号执行了第一次运算。
黑客历史学家George Dyson：数字宇宙之大爆炸编辑本段回目录
20世纪最具威力的两项发明——核弹和计算机出自同一时代、同一群年青人。可是，与大名鼎鼎的曼哈顿计划（第二次世界大战中美国原子弹研究计划）相比，计算机的起源显得默默无闻。
出身计算机世家的历史学家 George Dyson 在其新书《图灵大教堂》（Turing’sCathedral）中讲述了阿兰· 图灵、约翰· 冯· 诺依曼等一帮子天才小子创造计算机及预见计算机未来盛况的轶事。
Dyson 向《连线》前主编凯文· 凯利（以下分别简称 Dayson 和 KK）讲述了“数字宇宙”的“大爆炸”。
KK：我们在进行电话访谈，这时我们是否处于这个数字宇宙中？
Dayson：当然。您正在用数字录音机将这次对话录制到一个位于个某芯片上的空地址矩阵中，写入速度为每秒 44 千字节。这个写满数字的地址空间就是数字宇宙。
KK：这个平行光速宇宙是如何开始的？
Dayson：这个广袤无比的数字世界几乎能让我们随时获取任何内容，它可以追溯到 MANIAC 中的第一个地址存储器，大小仅有 32×32×40字节，即 5 千字节，或者说这个空间可以录制这次谈话的几分之一秒的内容！
KK：这个宇宙的膨胀速度有多快？
Dayson：正如宇宙形成之初，爆炸多过膨胀。我们身在其中，难以察觉。我曾经测量过，数字宇宙在存储端的膨胀速度为 5 兆字节每秒，处理器的膨胀速度为每秒 2 兆晶体管。
KK：在创造传奇的过程中，有哪些英雄人物？
Dayson：阿兰·图灵是原始创意逻辑学家；朱利安· 毕格罗（Julian Bigelow）是造出实际机器的工程师；生物学家尼尔斯·巴黎塞利（Nils Barricelli）监督发展情况；约翰·冯·诺依曼赢得政府资金和信心，促使项目启动；约翰· 冯· 诺依曼的妻子克拉利·冯·诺依曼（Klari von Neumann）写代码。
KK ：这个数字宇宙奔向何方？
Dayson：我们创造了这个不断膨胀的计算宇宙，它敞开怀抱迎接所有事物的发展演变。它越转越快，规模远远不止每年翻一倍。就算有 Google 和 YouTube 以及 Facebook 帮忙，我们也无法将它耗尽。我们无法真正了解这个巨大无比的空间中装着些什么。在人类看来，计算机 99% 的时间都在空转，只知道等待下一个指令。虽然计算机在等着我们提供指令，但越来越多的计算却脱离我们而发生，因为计算机会为计算机写指令。
正如图灵用数学方式展示出来的那样，这个空间无法监督。随着数字宇宙的膨胀，这桀骜不驯的一面也会如此。
相关链接编辑本段回目录
- Biography and articles from Edge.org
- George Dyson's Flickr Photostream
- Dyson, Baidarka & Company (Flickr Photostream by Thomas Gotchy)
- George Dyson's Mother, Verena Huber-Dyson
- A lecture by George Dyson on "von Neumann's universe"
- Engineers' Dreams
- TED Talks: George Dyson at the birth of the computer at TED
- TED Talks: George Dyson on Project Orion at TED
参考文献编辑本段回目录
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/zh-cn/george_dyson_at_the_birth_of_the_computer.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dyson_(science_historian)
