computers

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George Dyson on the Birth of the Computer

George Dyson returns to TED with a seventeen-minute talk explaining the origins of the digital computer -- in hilarious style. Briefly starting with Leibniz's machine-based calculus proposal from 1679, Dyson takes us on a humorous ride through early computer development, with tons of anecdotes from early computer engineers' notebooks (including scans of all sorts of amusing notes). (If you can't see the visuals well enough below, try downloading the full-size MP4 file). If you like history or math,... READ ON

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Code Rush: The Inside Story of Netscape

Today we take great web browsers for granted -- there are several free and open options, and they all seem to work pretty well. But a decade ago, we were still used to paying cash money for new browser releases, and Netscape was doing battle with Microsoft in the courts as well as con users' desktops. In the rush to ship new and better products, and change the browser marketplace, Netscape was about to do something radical: go open source. Netscape was also about to merge with AOL -- not exactly an... READ ON

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Required Viewing: The Machine That Changed the World

Andy Baio of Waxy.org has begun posting digitized versions of a 1992 documentary about personal computers entitled The Machine That Changed the World. Narrated by Frontline veteran Will Lyman, the WGBH Boston documentary is "the longest, most comprehensive documentary about the history of computing ever produced," according to Baio. The documentary is great fun -- featuring extensive interviews with major computer pioneers, it covers a broad spectrum of computer history and trivia. From Baio's... READ ON

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How to Solve a Rubik's Cube in Only 23 Moves

I've never solved a Rubik's Cube. I'm that guy who takes the stickers off puts them where I want them in order to get it over with. (Much to the consternation of any legitimate puzzle-solver who might try to use my cube in the future.) So it was with some amazement that I learned that Rubik's Cube solutions are an area of active mathematical research. There are scholars out there working on ideal cube-solving algorithms, and major progress is being made towards "God's algorithm" -- more on that in a... READ ON

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Why reCAPTCHA is Good for Humanity

Last week we talked about KittenAuth, a novel CAPTCHA system used to differentiate between humans and spambots -- by using pictures of kittens. Today let's take a look at reCAPTCHA, the system in use by this very blog. What does it do, and why is it good for humanity? What's a CAPTCHA? First let's review the term CAPTCHA. It's a loose acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." The idea is to force humans to do a (relatively) simple task like read a... READ ON

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CAPTCHA Variants: KittenAuth

Over the coming weeks, I'll highlight a few of the best (and weirdest) CAPTCHA systems available on the web. CAPTCHAs are those "type this word" or "answer this question" tests you see on many web forms -- they're there in an attempt to prove that the entity filling out the form is not a spambot. The term CAPTCHA is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." (The subject of Turing tests deserves its own blog entry, but let's just summarize here by... READ ON

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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine

Danny Hillis is best known for his Connection Machine, a massively parallel supercomputer that led to breakthroughs in computational science and parallel computing. (It also was the subject of Hillis's book The Connection Machine, which was a highly technical but fascinating version of his thesis paper on parallel computing. If you want the only halfway mind-blowing version, check out The Pattern on the Stone.) Hillis later led R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering, but in my book the Connection Machine was... READ ON

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Nicholas Negroponte On the Future: Predictions From 24 Years Ago

Nicholas Negroponte is best known today for his work with the One Laptop Per Child project, but he's been doing interesting and pioneering technological work for a long time. In 1984, Negroponte gave a talk at the very first TED conference. His talk was about how people interact with computers, both in the present (in 1984!) and his hopes for the future. Negroponte's discussion is surprisingly relevant to modern technology; his view of technology from the very early days of the personal computer focuses... READ ON

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Documentaries I Like: Connections

Connections was a documentary series produced for the BBC in 1978. It sought to explain human history through an "alternative view of change" in which multiple aspects of history, including technology, religion, and finance combine to bring about social change. This mode of analysis moves beyond conventional linear narrative, and as a result embraces complexity. Each episode is an essay connecting several seemingly disparate events or technologies through an extended web of logic -- it's great fun to... READ ON

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Gaming History: Discovering Deep Ms. Pac-Man Secrets

I played a fair amount of Ms. Pac-Man in my youth, sometimes plugging my entire $3 allowance into the machine at the movie theater, or the one at the pizza parlor near my grandmother's house. I was never any good at it -- never much good at any arcade games, really -- but my father and brother were skilled Ms. Pac-Man gamers. They preferred Ms. Pac-Man to the original Pac-Man, but I don't recall ever getting an answer about why. (I must have assumed that her little red bow was the killer feature.)... READ ON