Comment by neilv
2 years ago
My favorite story kinda of this nature, of an expert as alien intelligence, was Feynmann's calculations about computer architecture of the Connection Machine:
https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin...
It's a few paragraphs, maybe too much to quote, but the bulk of it starts with:
> By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. [...] Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.
Guess who was right.
The whole essay is worth reading, if you haven't yet.
That was a great read. It was also interesting to read about what happened to the company.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporatio...
One thought I had while reading this was what areas of technologies are still open to amateurs.
I hadn't seen that before, so thanks for posting it. What a great story!