Advent of Computing Sean Haas

It's finally time! In this episode we are looking at the Monte Carlo method, perhaps the first practical computer program that could outpace human capability. The best part: the method relies on a random walk to reach a statistically valid answer!

 

Selected Sources:
 

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/10596 - Igniting the Light Elements
 

https://library.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326866.pdf - The Beginning of the Monte Carlo Method, Nick Metropolis

I will admit, the title here is a bit of click bait. In the early 1950s a researcher named Nils Aall Barricelli started in on a bold project. His goal was to simulate evolution on a computer and, in doing so, create a perfect lab to study evolutionary processes. What he found was astonishing. Given a simple rule set these interesting patterns emerged. He called them symbioorganisms. Despite being simple numeric constructs, they exhibited many properties of living things. Did Barricelli create a digital form of life?
Selected Sources:
https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/BF01556771 - Numerical Testing of Evolution Theories. Please, just read this paper and be amazed!

This episode is simply a reading of the Story of Mel. I opened last episode with an excerpt, but didn't feel right leaving it at that. So, I present, the Story of Mel as written by Ed Nather and preserved in the Jargon file.

In 1956 Librascope released the LGP-30, a truly wild machine. It was, for the time, the most simple and cheap machine that could actually be useful. It was the size of a desk when contemporary machines took up small rooms. It plugged into a normal wall outlet while other machines requires special power feeds. It was, perhaps, the first hint of a personal computer. And at its heart was a magnetic drum that only a true programmer could love.
 

Selected Sources:
 

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html - The Story of Mel
 

https://sci-hub.se/10.1109/TEC.1957.5221555 - Frankel's MINAC Paper
 

http://www.hp9825.com/html/stan_frankel.html - A Biography of Frankel

I'm wrapping up my dive into Prolog with... Prolog itself! This episode I'm actually covering the development of Prolog, using all the natural language processing lore we covered last time. Along the way we will see how Prolog developed from a set of tools, and how those tools were generalized into a useful language.
Selected Sources:
http://alain.colmerauer.free.fr/alcol/ArchivesPublications/PrologHistory/19november92.pdf - The Birth of Prolog
https://archive.org/details/introductiontoma0000hutc/mode/1up?q=%22q-systems%22&view=theater - An Introduction to Machine Translation

I've been told I need to do an episode about Prolog. Well, here's the start of that process. To talk about Prolog we first need to come to grips with natural language processing, it's tools, and it's languages. This episode we are doing just that, going from ELIZA to Planner ro SHRDLU in an attempt to figure out how AI was first taught human tongues, where smoke and mirrors end, and where facinting programming begins.

 
Selected Sources:

 
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/365153.365168 - ELIZA

 
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:cm792pj8606/cm792pj8606.pdf - Planner

 
https://web.archive.org/web/20200725084321/http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/shrdlu/AITR-235.pdf - SHRDLU