From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Computing Theory Timeline

A dated manuscript by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, preserved in the Niedersachsische Landesbibliothek, Hannover, “includes a brief discussion of the possibility of designing a mechanical binary calculator which would use moving balls to represent binary digits.”

Though Leibniz thought of the application of binary arithmetic to computing in 1679, the machine he outlined was never built, and he published nothing on the subject until his Explication de l'arithmétique binaire, qui se sert des seuls caracteres 0 & 1; avec des remarques sur son utilité, & sur ce qu'elle donne le sens des anciens figues Chinoises de Fohy' published in Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences année MDCCIII. Avec les mémoires de mathématiques which appeared in print in 1705.

"The publication of the Explication was prompted by Leibniz's correspondence with Joachim Bouvet, a member of the Jesuit Mission in China. Leibniz had developed an interest in China, and in April 1697 he edited a collection of letters and essays by members of the Mission, entitled Novissima Sinica. A copy of this came into the hands of Bouvet, who wrote to Leibniz on 18 October 1697 expressing his commendation of the work. Thus began an extended correspondence between the two men which proved to be very important for the dissemination of Leibniz's ideas about binary arithmetic. The crucial exchange began on 15 February 1701, when Leibniz wrote to Bouvet describing for his correspondent the principles of his binary arithmetic, including the analogy of the formation of all the numbers from 0 and 1 with the creation of the world by God out of nothing. Bouvet immediately recognised the relationship between the hexagrams of the I ching and the binary numbers and he communicated his discovery in a letter written in Peking on 4 November 1701. This reached Leibniz, after a detour through England, on 1 April 1703. With this letter, Bouvet enclosed a woodcut of the arrangement of the hexagrams attributed to Fu-Hsi, the mythical founder of Chinese culture, which holds the key to the identification. Within a week of receiving Bouvet's letter, Leibniz had sent to Abbé Bignon for publication in the Mémoires of the Paris Academy his Explication de l'Arithmétique binaire,... & sue ce qu'elle donne le sens des anciens figures Chinoises de Fohy. Ten days later he sent a brief account to Hans Sloane, the Secretary of the Royal Society. Leibniz viewed binary arithmetic less as a computational tool than as a means of discovering mathematical, philosophical and even theological truths. He remarked to Tschirnhaus in 1682 that he anticipated from the use of binary numbers discoveries in number theory that other progressions could not reveal. It was at the same time a candidate for the characteristica generalis, his long sought-for alphabet of human thought. With base 2 numeration Leibniz witnessed a confluence of several intellectual strands in his world view, including theological and mystical ideas of order, harmony and creation. Fontanelle, secretary of the Paris Academy, wrote the unsigned review of Liebniz's paper for the Mémoires section of the volume. He noted that arithmetic could have different bases besides ten; bases such as 12, and two as in the case of Leibniz's binary system. He also noted that although the binary system was not practical for common use Leibniz thought that it would be of advantage in advanced mathematics" (W.P. Watson, antiquarian book description, http://www.ilabdatabase.com/db/detail.php?booknr=360538539, accessed 01-21-2010).

This manuscript was first published, along with as well as facsimiles of Leibniz's "Explication de l'arithmétique binaire" (1705) and his two letters to Johann Christian Schulenberg on binary arithmetic (March 29 and May 17, 1698), published in the Opera Omnia of 1768, with historical articles and translations in German, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Leibniz's death as Herrn von Leibniz' Rechnung mit Null und Eins (1966).

Charles Babbage conceives of the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that embodies in its design most of the features of the programmed digital computer.

Mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea publishes "Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage" in Bibliothèque universelle de Genève, nouvelle série 41 (1842): 352–76.

This was the first published account of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine and the first account of its logical design, including the first examples of computer programs ever published. As is well known, Babbage’s conception and design of his Analytical Engine—the first general purpose programmable digital computer—were so far ahead of the imagination of his mathematical and scientific colleagues that few expressed much curiosity regarding it. The only presentation that Babbage made concerning the design and operation of the Analytical Engine was to a group of Italian scientists.

In 1840 Babbage traveled to Torino to make a presentation on the Analytical Engine. Babbage’s talk, complete with charts, drawings, models, and mechanical notations, emphasized the Engine’s signal feature: its ability to guide its own operations—what we call conditional branching. In attendance at Babbage’s lecture was the young Italian mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea (later prime minister of Italy), who prepared from his notes an account of the principles of the Analytical Engine. Reflecting a lack of urgency regarding radical innovation unimaginable to us today, Menabrea did not get around to publishing his paper until two years after Babbage made his presentation, and when he did so he published it in French in a Swiss journal. Shortly after Menabrea’s paper appeared Babbage was refused government funding for construction of the machine.

"In keeping with the more general nature and immaterial status of the Analytical Engine, Menabrea’s account dealt little with mechanical details. Instead he described the functional organization and mathematical operation of this more flexible and powerful invention. To illustrate its capabilities, he presented several charts or tables of the steps through which the machine would be directed to go in performing calculations and finding numerical solutions to algebraic equations. These steps were the instructions the engine’s operator would punch in coded form on cards to be fed into the machine; hence, the charts constituted the first computer programs [emphasis ours]. Menabrea’s charts were taken from those Babbage brought to Torino to illustrate his talks there"(Stein, Ada: A Life and Legacy, 92).

Menabrea’s 23-page paper was translated into English the following year by Lord Byron’s daughter, Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, who, in collaboration with Babbage, added a series of lengthy notes enlarging on the intended design and operation of Babbage’s machine. Menabrea’s paper and Ada Lovelace’s translation represent the only detailed publications on the Analytical Engine before Babbage’s account in his autobiography (1864). Menabrea himself wrote only two other very brief articles about the Analytical Engine in 1855, primarily concerning his gratification that Countess Lovelace had translated his paper.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 60.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, translates Menabrea’s paper, "Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage".

Ada expanded her translation with annotations and software examples that provided further insight into Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine: Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage . . . with Notes by the Translator. (See Reading 6.1.)

George Boole publishes a pamphlet entitled The Mathematical Analysis of Logic -- a preliminary version of what eventually will be called Boolean algebra.

Years later, in 1938, Claude Shannon in his master’s thesis recognized that the true/false values in Boole’s two-valued logic are analogous to the open and closed states of electric circuits

English mathematician and philosopher George Boole publishes An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. This work contains the full expression of the first practical system of logic in algebraic form.

"He [Boole] did not regard logic as a branch of mathematics, as the title of his earlier pamphlet [The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847)] might be taken to imply, but he pointed out such a deep analogy between the symbols of algebra and those which can be made, in his opinion, to represent logical forms and syllogisms, that we can hardly help saying that (especially his) formal logic is mathematics restricted to the two quantities, 0 and 1. By unity Boole denoted the universe of thinkable objects; literal symbols, such as x, y, z, v, u, etc., were used with the elective meaning attaching to common adjectives and substantives. Thus, if x=horned and y=sheep, then the successive acts of election represented by x and y, if performed on unity, give the whole of the class horned sheep. Boole showed that elective symbols of this kind obey the same primary laws of combination as algebraic symbols, whence it followed that they could be added, subtracted, multiplied and even divided, almost exactly in the same manner as numbers. Thus, (1 - x) would represent the operation of selecting all things in the world except horned things, that is, all not horned things, and (1 - x) (1 - y) would give us all things neither horned nor sheep. By the use of such symbols propositions could be reduced to the form of equations, and the syllogistic conclusion from two premises was obtained by eliminating the middle term according to ordinary algebraic rules.

"Still more original and remarkable, however, was that part of his system, fully stated in his Laws of Thought, formed a general symbolic method of logical inference. Given any propositions involving any number of terms, Boole showed how, by the purely symbolic treatment of the premises, to draw any conclusion logically contained in those premises. The second part of the Laws of Thought contained a corresponding attempt to discover a general method in probabilities, which should enable us from the given probabilities of any system of events to determine the consequent probability of any other event logically connected with the given events" (Wikipedia article on George Boole, accessed 01-09-2008).

Though the audience for Boole's highly specialized work would have been judged to be small, and the edition size reduced accordingly, the existence of three issues of the first edition, all dated 1854, would suggest that the edition may have required several years to sell. The points of the issues are as follows:

1. Probable first issue: London: Walton and Maberly, Upper Gower-Street, and Ivy Lane, Paternoster-Row. Cambridge: Macmilan and Co., errata leaf bound in the back, and binding of black zigzag cloth with blindstamped border, panel, central lozenge and corner and side ornaments.

2. Probable second issue: London: Walton and Maberly as above, but with the errata after the last numbered leaf of preliminaries, an additional printed "Note" leaf following 2E4 concerning a more complex error, an eight-page Walton and Maberly catalogue of "Educational Works and Works in Science and General Literature" and a binding of black blind-panelled zigzag cloth without the central lozenge.

3. Third issue: London: Macmillan and Co. Errata on recto of last unsigned leaf, and bound in green cloth, gilt-lettered spine. This may be a later, or remainder binding

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 266.

English mathematician, engineer and computer designer Charles Babbage publishes his autobiography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, in which he presents the most detailed descriptions of his Difference and Analytical Engines published during his lifetime, and writes about his struggles to have his highly futuristic inventions appreciated by society.

In the wording of his title Babbage used the word philosopher in its now obsolete sense of what we call a "scientist." The word scientist coined by William Whewell was not widely used until the end of the 19th or early 20th century. (See Reading 6.2.)

James Clerk Maxwell publishes “On Governors,” a classic paper on feedback mechanisms

William Stanley Jevons constructs his “logical piano,” the first logic machine to solve complicated problems with superhuman speed.

Charles Babbage’s son Henry Prevost Babbage completes and publishes his father’s unfinished edition of writings on the Difference Engine No. 1 and the Analytical Engine, together with a listing of his father’s unpublished plans and notebooks. These appear under the title of Babbage’s Calculating Engines.

German mathematician and physicist David Hilbert publishes in Mathematische Probleme a list of twenty-three problems that he predicts will be of central importance to the advance of mathematics in the twentieth century.

In the second of these problems Hilbert called for a mathematical proof of the consistency of the arithmetic axioms—a question that influenced both the development of mathematical logic and computing.

Hilbert's paper was first published in Nachrichten der Königliche Gesellschaft zur Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Mathematische-physikalischen Klasse, 3 (1900).

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 320.

Leonardo Torres y Quevedo builds the first decision-making automaton — a chess-playing machine that pits the machine’s rook and king against the king of a human opponent.

Quevedo's machine was fully automatic with electrical sensing of the pieces on the board and a mechanical arm to move its own pieces.

German mathematician Leopold Löwenheim publishes Über Möglichkeiten im Relativkalkül, containing the first appearance of what is now known as the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, the first theorem of modern logic, anticipating Kurt Gödel’s completeness theorem of 1930.

Löwenheim's paper was first published in Mathematischen Annalen 76 (1915) 447-470. A summary and English translation are in van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel (1967)228-51.

Norwegian mathematician Albert Skolem proves the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem, a landmark in mathematical logic.

Skolem's paper was first published as "Logisch-kombinatorische Untersuchungen über die Erfüllbarkeit oder Beweisbarkeit mathematischer Sätze nebst einem Theoreme über dichte Mengen", Videnskapsselskapet Skrifter, I. Matematisk-naturvidenskabelig Klasse 6 (1920) 1–36.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 365. An English translation of Skolem's paper appears in van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel (1967) 254-63.

At the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Bologna, Italy, mathematician and physicist David Hilbert returned to the second of the twenty-three problems posed in his 1900 paper, asking, is mathematics complete, is it consistent, and is it decidable?

Three years later, the first two of these questions were answered in the negative by Kurt Gödel. Working independently, Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, and Emil Post published answers to the third question in 1936.

Hilbert's paper was first published in Atti del Congresso Internazionale dei Matematici, Bologna 3-10 settembre 1928 (VI) I (1929) 135-41.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 320.

Mathematician, physicist, and economist John von Neumann publishes "Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele" in Mathematische Annalen, 100, 295–300. This paper "On the Theory of Parlor Games" propounds the minimax theorem, inventing the theory of games.

Kurt Gödel proves the incompleteness and inconsistency of arithmetic, and invents the theory of recursive functions.

Konrad Zuse, a German mechanical engineer, realizes that an automatic calculator would need only a control, a memory, and an arithmetic unit.

Vannevar Bush begins the Rapid Arithmetical Machine Project at MIT.

In a paper called "Instrumental Analysis", he suggested how an electromechanical machine might be built to accomplish Charles Babbage’s goals for the Analytical Engine. This was almost exactly one hundred years after Babbage began designing his Analytical Engine.

In the same paper Bush wrote that four billion punched cards were being used annually in electric tabulating machines. This amounted to ten thousand tons of punched cards.

Alonzo Church publishes his logical proof of the undecidability of arithmetic, using his lambda calculus.

Alan Turing spends more than a year at Princeton University to study mathematical logic with Alonzo Church, who is pursuing research in recursion theory.

Konrad Zuse applies for a patent on his electromagnetic, program-controlled calculator, called the Z1. 

Zuse built the machine in the living room of his parents’ apartment in Berlin. It had 30,000 parts.

The Z1 was the first freely programmable, binary-based calculating machine ever built, but it did not function reliably, and it was destroyed in World War II. Zuse's patent application is the only surviving documentation of Zuse's prewar work on computers.

Between 1986 and 1989 Zuse and three associates created a replica of the Z1, which is preserved in the Deutsche Technikmuseum.

Alan Turing publishes On Computable Numbers, a mathematical description of what he calls a universal machine that can, in principle, solve any mathematical problem that can be presented to it in symbolic form.

Turing modeled the universal machine processes after the functional processes of a human carrying out mathematical computation. (See Reading 7.1.)

Alonzo Church calls Alan Turing’s universal machine a Turing Machine. (See Reading 7.2.)

Independently of Alan Turing, Emil Post develops a mathematical model of computation that is essentially equivalent to the Turing machine. "Intending this as the first of a series of models of equivalent power but increasing complexity he titles his paper Formulation 1. This model is sometime's called "Post's machine" or a Post-Turing machine."

At Princeton University  Alan Turing and John von Neumann have their first discussions about computing and what will later be called “artificial intelligence” (AI).

Claude Shannon, in his master’s thesis entitled A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, submitted to MIT on August 10, 1937, and published in a revised and abridged version in 1938, shows that the two-valued algebra developed by Boole can be used as a basis for the design of electrical circuits.

This thesis became the theoretical basis for the electronics and computer industries that will developed after World War II. Shannon wrote the thesis while working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City. As examples of circuits that could be built using relays, Shannon appended to the thesis theoretical descriptions of "An Electric Adder to the Base Two," and "A Factor Table Machine." The "Factor Table Machine" was not included in the published version. Shannon's thesis was later characterized as the most significant master's thesis of the 20th century, (See Reading 12.1.)

Shannon's thesis was first published in Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 57 (1938) 713-23.

John Atanasoff at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, plans the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), a special-purpose electronic computer.

Konrad Zuse completes his Z1 mechanical computer in his parents’ Berlin apartment.

Independently of Claude Shannon, Zuse developed a form of symbolic logic to assist in the design of the binary circuits. With Helmut Schreyer, he began work on the Z2.

IBM starts construction on Aiken ’s Harvard Mark I.

Alan Turing reports to the Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park, in the town of Bletchley, England.

Max Newman and his team at Bletchley Park, including Alan Turing, create the top-secret Heath Robinson cryptographic computer, named after the cartoonist-designer of fantastic machines.

This special-purpose relay computer successfully decoded messages encrypted by Enigma, the Nazis' first-generation enciphering machine.

Vannevar Bush writes a memorandum entitled “Arithmetical Machine.”

This memorandum shows that the Rapid Arithmetical Machine Project begun in 1936 was already well-advanced conceptually. Bush continued to focus most of his computational energy on building the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer II, a 100 ton machine  that included 2000 vacuum tubes and 150 electric motors.

John Atanasoff writes a thirty-five-page memorandum describing the design and principles of the ABC machine.

This may be the earliest extant document describing the principles of an electronic digital computer. It remained unpublished until 1973.

Inspired by the September 11, 1940 demonstration of remote computing using George Stibitz's electromechanical Complex Number Calculator, Norbert Wiener sends a letter to Vannevar Bush enclosing a “Memorandum on the Mechanical Solution of Partial Differential Equations.” This outlined a machine that had all the features of an electronic digital computer except for a stored program.

The memorandum was not published until it appeared in Wiener’s Collected Works (1976-84). (See Reading 7.3.)

John Mauchly meets John Atanasoff at the Philadelphia meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science.

After corresponding with Atanasoff about electronic calculating, Mauchly visited Atanasoff in Iowa and read the 35-page memorandum on the ABC machine that Atanasoff had written in August.

Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman at Bletchley Park design an improved Bombe cryptanalysis machine for deciphering Enigma messages.

Helmut Schreyer, Konrad Zuse’s associate, receives his doctorate in telecommunications engineering with a dissertation on the use of vacuum-tube relays in switching circuits.

Schreyer converted Zuse’s logical designs into electronic circuits, building a simple prototype of an electronic computer, which achieved a switching frequency of 10,000 Hz.

J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly meet at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, and begin discussions on electronic computing.

John Atanasoff’s special-purpose ABC machine is nearly operational when work on it is abandoned because of World War II.

Konrad Zuse starts work on the Z4 electromechanical computer.

John Mauchly writes a privately circulated confidential memorandum on “The Use of High Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating”

Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts publish “A Logical Calculus of the ideas Imminent in Nervous Activity,” describing the McCulloch - Pitts neuron, the first mathematical model of a neural network.

Building on ideas in  Alan Turing’s “On Computable Numbers”, McCulloch and Pitts's paper provided a way to describe brain functions in abstract terms, and showed that simple elements connected in a neural network can have immense computational power. The paper received little attention until its ideas were applied by John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and others. (See Reading 7.4.)

Logician and cognitive psychologist Walter Pitts, an autodidact without a high school or college diploma, accepts a position at MIT to work with Norbert Wiener.

Faced with mathematical computations regarding the Atomic bomb that are too time-consuming for human computers, John von Neumann visits the ENIAC two-accumulator system for the first time, and becomes deeply interested in the project.

Mathematician and physicist John von Neumann  privately circulates copies of his First Draft on a Report on the EDVAC to twenty-four people connected with the EDVAC project.

This document, written between February and June 1945, provided the first theoretical description of the basic details of a stored-program computer what later became known as the Von Neumann architecture.

To avoid the government's security classification, and to avoid engineering problems that might detract from the logical considerations under discussion, Von Neumann avoided mentioning specific hardware. Influenced by Alan Turing and by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, von Neumann patterned the machine to some degree after human thought processes. (See Reading 8.1.)

In June 2009 I was able to download a PDF of the text of von Neumann's report at this link: http://www.virtualtravelog.net/entries/2003-08-TheFirstDraft.pdf.

The Moore School lectures on “The theory and techniques for design of electronic digital computers” take place. This series of lectures, attended by twenty-eight highly qualified experts, led to widespread adoption of the EDVAC-type design, including stored programs, for nearly all subsequent computer development.

At the initiative of Warren McCulloch, the Macy Conferences occurred in New York to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind.  They resulted in breakthroughs in systems theory, cybernetics, and what eventually became known as cognitive science.

John von Neumann attempts to set up an electronic stored-program computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton.

Von Neumann tried to hire Pres Eckert, but Eckert refused the job, preferring to go into the computer business with John Mauchly.

Arthur W. Burks, John von Neumann, and Herman Goldstine issue their Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument, discussing ideas to be incorporated into the stored-program computer at the IAS. (See Reading 8.3.)

In a lecture to the London Mathematical Society that remained unpublished until 1986, Alan Turing stated that “digital computing machines such as the ACE. . . are in fact practical versions of the universal machine.”

The first part of Herman Goldstine and John von Neumann’s Planning and Coding Problems for an Electronic Computing Instrument is published. The remaining two parts appeared on April 15 and August 16, 1948. This was the first theoretical discussion of programming for stored program computers -- none of which yet operated. (See Reading 9.2.)

Norbert Wiener publishes Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, a widely read and influential book that applied theories of information and communication to both biological systems and machines. Cybernetics was also the first conventionally published book to discuss electronic digital computing. Writing as a mathematician rather than an engineer, Wiener’s discussion was theoretical rather than specific.

Computer-related words with the “cyber” prefix, including "cyberspace," originate from Wiener’s book.

Wiener's book was reviewed in TIME Magazine on December 27, 1948. The review was entitled "In Man's Image." The reviewer used the word calculator to describe the machines; at this time the word computer was reserved for humans.

"Some modern calculators 'remember' by means of electrical impulses circulating for long periods around closed circuits. One kind of human memory is believed to depend on a similar system: groups of neurons connected in rings. The memory impulses go round & round and are called upon when needed. Some calculators use 'scanning' as in television. So does the brain. In place of the beam of electrons which scans a television tube, many physiologists believe, the brain has 'alpha waves': electrical surges, ten per second, which question the circulating memories.

"By copying the human brain, says Professor Wiener, man is learning how to build better calculating machines. And the more he learns about calculators, the better he understands the brain. The cyberneticists are like explorers pushing into a new country and finding that nature, by constructing the human brain, pioneered there before them.

"Psychotic Calculators. If calculators are like human brains, do they ever go insane? Indeed they do, says Professor Wiener. Certain forms of insanity in the brain are believed to be caused by circulating memories which have got out of hand. Memory impulses (of worry or fear) go round & round, refusing to be suppressed. They invade other neuron circuits and eventually occupy so much nerve tissue that the brain, absorbed in its worry, can think of nothing else.

"The more complicated calculating machines, says Professor Wiener, do this too. An electrical impulse, instead of going to its proper destination and quieting down dutifully, starts circulating lawlessly. It invades distant parts of the mechanism and sets the whole mass of electronic neurons moving in wild oscillations" (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,886484-2,00.html, accessed 03-05-2009).

At the Hixon Symposium in Pasadena, California, John von Neumann delivers his General and Logical Theory of Automata. This was the first of a series of five works (some posthumous) in which he attempted to develop a precise mathematical theory allowing comparison of computers and the human brain.

Edmund Berkeley publishes Giant Brains or Machines that Think, the first popular book on electronic computers.

Among many interesting details, Giant Brains contains a discussion about a machine called Simon, which has been called the first personal computer. (See Reading 8.6.)

Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, a neurological surgeon at Manchester, delivers a speech entitled The Mind of Mechanical Man in which he discusses the differences between computers and the human brain. (See Reading 11.1).

Alan Turing publishes Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he describes the “Turing test" for determining whether a machine is “intelligent.” (See Reading 11.2)

Jule Charney, Agnar Fjörtoff, and John von Neumann publish “Numerical Integration of the Barotropic Vorticity Equation,” Tellus 2 (1950): 237-254.

Charney, Fjörthoff, and von Neumann's paper reported the first weather forecast by electronic computer. It took twenty-four hours of processing time on the ENIAC to calculate a twenty-four hour forecast.

"As a committed opponent of Communism and a key member of the WWII-era national security establishment, von Neumann hoped that weather modeling might lead to weather control, which might be used as a weapon of war. Soviet harvests, for example, might be ruined by a US-induced drought.

"Under grants from the Weather Bureau, the Navy, and the Air Force, he assembled a group of theoretical meteorologists at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). If regional weather prediction proved feasible, von Neumann planned to move on to the extremely ambitious problem of simulating the entire atmosphere. This, in turn, would allow the modeling of climate. Jule Charney, an energetic and visionary meteorologist who had worked with Carl-Gustaf Rossby at the University of Chicago and with Arnt Eliassen at the University of Oslo, was invited to head the new Meteorology Group.

"The Meteorology Project ran its first computerized weather forecast on the ENIAC in 1950. The group's model, like [Lewis Fry] Richardson's, divided the atmosphere into a set of grid cells and employed finite difference methods to solve differential equations numerically. The 1950 forecasts, covering North America, used a two-dimensional grid with 270 points about 700 km apart. The time step was three hours. Results, while far from perfect, justified further work" (Paul N. Edwards [ed], Atmospheric General Circulation Modeling: A Participatory History, accessed 04-26-2009).

Claude Shannon publishes Programming a computer for playing chess, the first technical paper on computer chess. (See Reading 11.3.)

The Paris symposium,  Les Machines á calculer et la pensée humaine (Calculating Machines and Human Thought) takes place at l'Institut Blaise Pascal.

Unlike the other early computer conferences, no demonstration of a stored-program electronic computer took place.  Louis Couffignal demonstrated the prototype of his non-stored-program machine.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 526.

John von Neumann dies of cancer at the age of fifty-four.

Arthur Lee Samuel publishes "Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers," IBM Journal of Research and Development 3 (1959) no. 3, 210-29.

In this work Samuel demonstrated that machines can learn from past errors — one of the earliest examples of non-numerical computation.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 874.

Leonard Kleinrock publishes "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" in RLE Quarterly Progress Reports. This was the first publication to describe and analyze an algorithm for chopping messages into smaller pieces, later to be known as packets. Kleinrock's MIT doctoral thesis, Message Delay in Communication Nets with Storage, filed in December 1962, elaborated on the impact of this algorithm on data networks. (See Reading 13.3.)

Philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist John Alan Robinson publishes "A Machine-Oriented Logic Based on the Resolution Principle", Communications of the ACM, 5:23–41.

This paper introduced the resolution principle, a standard of logical deduction in AI applications.

James Cooley and John Tukey publish the Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm, the most common fast Fourier transform algorithm .

Engineer and computer designer Konrad Zuse publishes Rechnender Raum. This was translated into English in 1970 under the title, Calculating Space. It was the first book on digital physics.

"Zuse proposed that the universe is being computed in real time on some sort of cellular automata or other discrete computing machinery, challenging the long-held view that some physical laws are continuous by nature. He focused on cellular automata as a possible substrate of the computation, and pointed out (among other things) that the classical notions of entropy and its growth do not make sense in deterministically computed universes.

"Bell's theorem is sometimes thought to contradict Zuse's hypothesis, but it is not applicable to deterministic universes, as Bell himself pointed out. Similarly, while Heisenberg's uncertainty principle limits in a fundamental way what an observer can observe, when the observer is himself a part of the universe he is trying to observe, that principle does not rule out Zuse's hypothesis, which views any observer as a part of the hypothesized deterministic process. So far there is no unambiguous physical evidence against the possibility that "everything is just a computation," and a fair bit has been written about digital physics since Zuse's book appeared" (Wikipedia article on Calculating Space, accessed 05-16-2009).

IBM builds the first prototype computer employing RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture.

Based on an invention by John Cocke, the RISC concept simplified the instructions given to run computers, making them faster and more powerful. It was implemented in the experimental IBM 801 minicomputer. The goal of the 801 was to execute one instruction per cycle.

In 1987 John Cocke received the A. M. Turing Award for significant contributions in the design and theory of compilers, the architecture of large systems and the development of reduced instruction set computers (RISC); for discovering and systematizing many fundamental transformations now used in optimizing compilers including reduction of operator strength, elimination of common subexpressions, register allocation, constant propagation, and dead code elimination.

In the February issue of Wired James Gleick writes:

"Is the universe actually made of information? Humans have talked about atoms since the time of the ancients, and ever-smaller fundamental particles of matter followed. But no one even conceived of bits until the middle of the 20th century. The bit is a fundamental particle, too, but of different stuff altogether: information. It is not just tiny, it is abstract - a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. Now that scientists are finally starting to understand information, they wonder whether it’s more fundamental than matter itself. Perhaps the bit is the irreducible kernel of existence; if so, we have entered the information age in more ways than one."