What is a computer? (the history covering Leibniz, Babbage & Lovelace)
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- Опубліковано 1 лис 2016
- the origin and history of computers from Gottfried Leibniz's dreams of mechanizing mental work through Charles Babbage's analytic engine. It ends with Ada Lovelace's famous insights about computer programming...ushering a new era of Computer Science which explodes in the 20th Century.
Please support this independent production: / artoftheproblem
To learn more about Lovelace check out this article: blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/1...
I have a history of watching documentaries about computers... but this one blew my mind! I've always seen docs about the history of the machine, but never about how computer programming came to be... great piece!
This is really nice to hear, thanks for sharing. There is a lot out there but I try to do something a little bit different with each video. Next up Turning Machines!
wow... I think of myself as a computer scientist and this piece of work is incredible. 😱
Man your work is amazing! I enjoy every video you make. Please keep it up!
This was fantastic. Your videos are great.
The way you approach the ideas you talk about is so engaging, I always am wishing for you to say more. I just started working as a software developer and your videos have inspired me for a long time.
Keep up the good work and don't keep up waiting too long!
Hey there, how's your career going 5 years later?
wow, wow wow wow, I finally understand algorithms and the purpose of them, my mind has been blown.
Bravo! I shed manly tears.
The very last minute of the video is really emotionally impact-full for me. It's hard to explain, but at the end of the video you put everything into a much larger perspective; and the whole thing about a Ada Lovelace realizing the true power of something like the analytical engine (which was never built in their lifetime) is somehow stirring. Especially in a field of study historically dominated by men, I find it ironic and poetic. It's the same feeling when I realize, appreciate and generally contemplate the beauty and POWER of mathematics. Combine that with the music box music at the end and it kinda makes me wanna....you know. It's the same feeling, but about algorithms/computers. It's very hard to evoke that in film, but the end of the video does that for me. I often try to get my younger nephews interested in math and science and this is something I plan show them when appropriate, because I think it perfectly encapsulates the inherent beauty of abstract knowledge and it's impact on the world.
same here, also reminded me of 'Contact' by Daft Punk
Hands down for you sir. Your videos are always way too informative. I get more than what expect. Thanks a lot! I will recommend your channel to my friends and colleagues.
...found a UA-cam gem. Sub'd.
Awesome as usual...love the way in which you explain such a complex topic in such a simple way
i can't believe you can build instructions for anything just with ifs and step by step actions ! it's mind blowing for me
I know...i remember this feeling
@@ArtOfTheProblem but i need a confirmation , truly everything ? wow ! with simple things can build complicated
You should have way more subsribers! I've been following you for years and every video is a work of art. Thanks for doing this.
Happy to have you around, and hope to continue for years to come
CS has a deeply philosophical side that is rarely recognised, probably a side-effect of the enormous practical impact it has.
i agree
Oh Its recognized real alright, it's just this superficial system of economic convenience that suppresses and subverts its bloom
Another killer video. Don't disappear, the world needs these!
Absolutely love this series! Keep to the phenomenal work!
Yay! I am excited for the next one! keep up the awesome work.
You have a talent to make stuff sound really epic.
This series is a gem. It's like a philosophy of computer science. Bravo!!!
thrill to hear it that was the idea
@@ArtOfTheProblem very cool. These videos actually make me find a new, or deeper, appreciation for CS and computers, as I've been struggling with dissatisfaction with my CS study for a while now. So thanks for that! Looking forward to watching all of the other content!
@@schophi that was the goal of my content
This is incredible.
Thanks for feedback glad you appreciate this series. Next video will be out soon
Really inspiring, thank you
Excellent work. A+
Thank you for putting this together.
Thanks Ronnie, last video coming very soon
Bravo! Bravo! I must say this is personally one of my Beth videos to watch!
Subscribed. As an experienced software engineer, I can say you're videos are incredibly fun to watch and remind me why I got into software.
Awesome, welcome to the channel. more to come soon
Your videos are absolutely wonderful. I think the quality is at par with high quality documentaries.
I really appreciate the feedback
Excellent! I loved that you elaborated on Babbage's machine
Art of the Problem
Well, you could add the "extra bits" in another video ?! Brady Haran (numberphile, sixty symbols,...) makes private videos for the extra footages.
I'd be happy to watch that :)
Beautiful as always! And I didn't know you had a Patreon page!
Great video as always
You're videos are amazing
Fascinating! Very well presented video! The basics of the computer concept, i was never heared of that particular machine althought around the world there are many similar mechanical like-computer inventions this was new to me, and very interesting!
Beutiful content. super well done mate
Beautiful.
You can't have a video about the origin of the computer without Boole.
i get to boole
I just discovered you today. A really nice video. I am now duty bound to subscribe and explore your work!
welcome, happy to have you as subscriber - stay tuned!
this may be just me and my craziness however on the first part of your video there's a tone a high pitch tone I hear it and I remember I think it was a documentary about using the tone to keep teenagers away and it only bothered teenagers I may be hearing things but that sounds very familiar and it's going on the first part of your video which is a very great video I enjoyed it very much thank you
make more of these videos :O amazing!
Well done! Great historical context. i have been concerned with the notion that with the industrial revolution, we turned human into machines. Thereby leading to efficiencies in production at the cost of not nurturing our creative capacity. Something that we can now focus on as the machines are doing much more of the mundane tasks concerned with production and then some.
Thank you!!
Hey Brit, awesome stuff as always. Your content speaks for itself.
Will this be put up on Khan Academy? Are you still working there?
You should do a video about uncomputable problems like the halting problem
Anyone noticed a high pitched noise occur from 5:57 to 6:30, the noise became unbearable for me that I need to turn the volume down
I can't believe this information is free on a free app that anyone can access.
glad you found this
This is an amazing video
Thrilled you found it, people haven't been finding this in a long time
@@ArtOfTheProblem I am an Electrical Engineering student and am currently taking Digital Logic & Design. Currently, I am looking for more and more information because I’ve had a great time in the class and learned so much. Your channel popped up in my feed, I went through your videos watching a lot of the ones that interested me.
awesome! let me know what you think, i started this channel after finishing EE and going into compsci@@bzz8540
@@ArtOfTheProblem I like that the videos are concise and everything in the video is connected together. I also like that visuals and demonstrations are easy to understand, for example the parity bit venn diagram.
great, yes I wanted to try and simplify down to the essence@@bzz8540
Those high frequency sounds around 6:30
Good explanation. It will also be more educational if you add the years which happened.
Is there a name of what's going on at 6:19?
awesome
Now with English and Spanish subtitles
yeah!!
WHat's outside of reach of a mechanical process? Hmm, big question..
So I'm going to frame this one a little bit abstractly, but we're talking about "What can be computed". Now with modern computers being binary devices, there's always the battle of "how analog a result can we get from an intrinsically digital operation". My response would be, make is as quantised as needed for the senses to be fooled. But, the overarching question I feel is being asked here, on a more philosophical level is "how good can we make a simulation". My response would be similar to ye olde Matrix, but with the added fundamentals that our world (if real or virtual, it makes no difference) is already spacewise (dimentionally) quantised by the minimum distance set as the Planck length, and timewise by the speed of light. So to stack onto the question even more, "how good can we make a simulation" becomes "how can we tell we're being simulated", to which I don't have a clear answer. The computational complexity of such a device could even be deceptively simple, as all it would need to do is simulate everything. It can be as slow as it wants, since computational speed outside of the device would be unperceptible on the inside (of the simulation), since our senses would run at the same speed of realisation. Perhaps the Planck length is a sign of the simulations resolution in the spacial plane breaking down enough for us to see the bits. Perhaps there's more further down the rabbit hole.
Thanks for sharing, you got me typing a good bit of response here, which I don't do often anymore..
Unfortunately there's even more to it than just analog vs digital and simulations.
There are some (discrete) problems for which we know of no algorithm that will complete / give an answer within the lifetime of the universe. And yet still, we know of some (again discrete) problems which we have proven are completely unsolvable by algorithms altogether.
Okay, this is going to be a wall of text, my apologies in advance.. I'm going to respond to your reply with my first post in mind. I agree, to an extent. Some problems are hard. I assume you mean NP hard. The halting problem, calculating arbitrary digits of pi, e, or any other trancendental number (or orders higher), set theory, the Rieman hypothesis (and several other np hard hypotheses) etc.. But saying these problems are unsolvable forever is stretching it a bit far, as ultimately, we do not know of the way(method) we are being simulated. As far as the problems which are unsolvable now inside the simulation and proven to be unsolvable forever: As our computational abilities inside simulation increase with our knowledge and scientific development, so does the simulation. We have to take into account that we structure our way of thinking roughly into "stuff" (physical bits, that may or may not be interacting with eachotther in complex ways), and "information". The simulation itself has no such limitation. To it, everything is information. Whereas to us, even information ultimately has to be converted into physical form (storage medium), to even be able to move it from one place to the next, or use and transform it in some way. To the simulation, everything just fits nicely into the slides of existence at any given clockcycle. In fact, simulation clockcycles in itself may even be somewhat of a misnomer, as with a growing simulation (say we represent the total simulation as a really (reaaaaly) giant game of life) the exact moment the "total existence calculation for moment X" might be somewhat more of a pulse, spreading outward from the center, which might be a way of representing the wave/particle duality of photons? Inside the simulation, now more than ever with everything digitalising, being accessible faster and in a far more structured and searchable / sortable way, the simulation is starting to grow exponentially. The simulation might even have completely different laws of physics. We simply can not know, looking out from the inside.
Well actually when I mentioned problems that are proven to be unsolvable by algorithms, in principle, I was referring mostly to the Halting Problem (which is not NP hard, but is actually not solvable at all, by algorithms at least). The un-solvability of it is not due to any physical limitation, but due to the very definition of what an algorithm is. The halting problem could not be solved by an algorithm, regardless of how we were simulated (unless the simulation somehow changed the rules of logic, not just the rules of physics).
But has the simulation not also evolved far enough for us to be able to attain a concensus that some problems are unsolvable?
It basically says "there's a thing I'm simulating, and it's outcome is an endless loop of waiting for it to spit out the outcome." Or for short "Hey, here's the halting problem problem. You humans should ponder on this for a couple of centuries"
Humans quickly realise this is some form of booleansnobbery, and subsequently make art about it in the form of an electromotor hooked up to an insane amount of gear reductions, with the final gear cast in solid concrete. Then the simulation throws some more spanners in the works by declaring "Hey, remember this undeterminable thing I evolved into a couple of billion cycles ago, which you humans are so fond of pondering on? It's now not even possible to determine that the outcome can or cannot be solvable!". And humans pondered some more, and waited some more. And they created the cartoon series Futurama after "as the world turns" vanished from TV. In it, they pay the ultimate homage to the halting problem by portraying humankind as a dog waiting for his dead owner. Day in day out, just sits there. Then TV vanished. Then the internet was shutdown by sjw politicians, then we started killing eachoither with sticks and stones, because there was fuckall to ponder about.
tldr; If the problem is that you have to wait an infinite time for the answer, it's most efficient to move on in a way that reframes the solution to an unsolvable problem as a steady state.
Personally, I think FilthyFrank kind of nailed it when he stepped in front of the greenscreen with a giant clock, and uttered the words "It's time to stop!" :)
mind blown
Just wondering when we can expect more from this series? I've watched the cryptography and information series a couple times over and recommended them to friends. Really great stuff! Thanks for your hard work.
Thanks so much for the feedback Colin, uploading next video this week. Sorry for the delay...
That is good news. I am looking forward to it!
thank you omg
glad you enjoyed
I can't make out what you say in the very beginning: '...people wanted machines that could complete human tasks, often reffered to as ??? '
an automaton
Such a great video and explanation. This helped me a lot. It's like my whole identity and thinking patterns(beliefs and values) are the machine which was made for some purpose. But after thinking in a soul perspective I can now separate the program from the machine so I can put any algorithms in me thinking process and actions so I can actually becoma what ever I can imagine. Like the Lovelace understood that its just a matter of imagination. Then comes the interesting magical part. The God has a plan for each one of us, if we stop being the machine(selfish ego) and start to follow the vision(biggest dream what each one has) then the vision is same as God's will. So what is from God is eternal and if the soul follow this path it becomes eternal also, which is eternal afterlife because you are not a machine which borns again and again, but you are stepping out of Dharma in that way. You became the programmer which follows the creator guide to build a soul in the image of God, which is Love.
awesome so glad this video inspired more thinking
This is my favorite comment on this video and possibly in all of UA-cam. Thank you for such meditations. Its also akin to what the philosopher Hegel explicated in his system after being inspired by s tradition that followed from Leibniz
The computer scientist Donald Knuth was struck that “AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking’-that, somehow, is much harder!
Donald Ervin Knuth in Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (ISBN: 978-0199678112)
"What is out of reach of a mechanical process?"
Imagination... creativity...? Perhaps, perhaps not. We program chess computers to imagine the possible futures, and so we can do so for finite chains of events. How different is the human imagination, though? Apparently able to take on not only what exists, but what doesn't exist as well.
Is human imagination and creativity just a complex and detailed process of events?
It seems to be able to be described as such in a neuroscientific manner, only there is always a subject outside the norm.
Human can work algorithms.
Machines can work algorithms.
Are humans only machines?
Are humans more?
Are machines more?
Can they be?
Can machines do things that humans cannot imagine? Yet.
The first working computer was built by the German astronomer Wilhelm Schickard in 1623.
Computer
weird you write about Leibniz but made his part into like 10sec of what he already found out - and actually the first machines / computers could be a better start. And the status of 0 and 1 and that it can show everything is a fact know from ancient, long time forgotten, realized again from Leibniz and made up into big philosopical thougths ... nothin can be found in this video
would love more feedback, please go further in the series or just jump to turing machine or p np: ua-cam.com/video/u2DLlNQiPB4/v-deo.html
But I don't use soap
What kind of way is that to hold a pencil. You're lucky you're not from England.
LeibniTZ.