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Krawtchouk's Mind
A reader writes: "Central Europe Review is running an article on a gulag-condemned Soviet scientist whose contribution to the first computer is virtually unknown because of the Cold War mentality that infected much of society on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
The story tells of how in 1937, American digital computer pioneer John Atanasoff came across a Myhailo Krawtchouk paper on a new method for finding approximate solutions to differential equations. Atanasoff tried sending a letter to him, but received no response. Krawtchouk had been attainted for giving a favorable review of the work of "enemies of the people" and shipped to Siberia for 20 years of gold mining, where he died four years later. Krawtchouk's biography gives a more detailed account of how Krawtchouk was labeled a "Polish spy" and "Ukrainian nationalist," stripped of his Academy of Sciences membership, and forced to sign a confession -- that he later retracted -- under torture and threats upon his family.
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..the Cold War mentality that infected much of society on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The story tells of how in 1937...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Cold War and the Iron Curtain didn't begin until after WWII, in the late 1940's.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I think the first computer was invented in 1936 by a German scientist, Konrad Zuse, who later had to flee to Switzerland because of the war... At least that't About.com claims.
You know, it's really funny how things can be invented in several places at the same time... Like the modern guitar as we know it was come up with in China, the Middle East and Spain at the exact same times (and not chronologically, implying that the invention would have traveled)... Or how Pythagores, Zarathustra, Buddha and Lao-Tse, who each pioneered philosophy in their own continent, were contemporaries.
This isn't really even a communist thing. Geek persecution on both sides of the wall was rough. I mean, where's Alan Turing?
While the establishment's treatment of Turing was a disgrace, I think it pales into insignificance compared to Stalin's terror. For an excellent introduction to life at the time of the purges, I can highly recommend Solzhenitsyn's "One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich", closely followed by his "Gulag Archipelago". It's a while since I read the latter, but I'm pretty sure it's the one that fictionalised Russian scientists working in an "intelligentsia prison".
Chris
Although similar persecutions continue in some countries to these days, the public opinion in many democracies would not tolerate any outside action against the oppressing governments.
Living your life under Stalin, Kim of North Korea, Castro, Saddam Hussein is worse than war... Trade sanctions -- a modern democracies' usual "civilized" weapon against each other -- don't work against these scumbags. They pass the suffering onto their people...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
unless he is the "a reader" that submitted the story
6
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/4/27/5153/7362
note the word-for-word plagiarization/ lifting
just trying to keep it honest
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The printer was completed in 2000. It featured variable spacing and line wrapping. Not bad for something that is 100% mechanical.
It should be noted that as with the machine talked about here, this was a machine for solving simple differential equations (tides) as well as more standard types of maths (i.e., logs, sines and so on) for the production of tables. It was not a general purpose computer, that term was reserved for his Analytical Engine - which was designed but never produced. However Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace wrote some programs for it, converting equations into algorithms and generating register settings which could be punched on the Jacquard cards (Babbage pinched this idea from the manufacturers of automatic-looms, a long time before Hollerith).
If Babbage had completed the Analytical engine, we could have been in a very different world. One version would have been hypothesized in William Gibson's "The Difference Engine".
See my journal, I write things there
What you say? One country invading another for natural resources under the pretext of liberation and justice?
Why, that is so far-fetched it's incomprehensible-flaven-goyven. With the oil, and the grudges, and cowboy hats, and the terrrism, and the nuculur threat, and the weapons of mass destruuuuuuuction.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
This, its "Turingness", came about almost by accident - in breaking the Lorenz codes it ran a computation step where it worked out some property of captured cipher text against generated enciphering text. This produced a potential deciphered text, which an operater would look at to see if it made sense. The second generation machine was designed to calculate some statistical properties of the text, which could tell resonably well if it had been broken properly. It was when they were building the capability of doing this that the computed goto snuck in (which gave them the ability to do conditional branching), and the equivalent of "if Text looks like German then Stop".
After the war the runners of the machine tried to program it to do base 10 arithmetic, but clock speed was against them, so it never quite worked (not that they spent a lot of time on it as shortly after the war almost all the colossi were scrapped).
It was an odd machine - extremely fast at what it was built to do, with the bonus that it could do anything (given enough vacuum tubes!). Different to the ABC and Zuse machines in that these were non-Turing machines (I think that's true of the Atanasoft-Berry machine too - having looked at the information available it doesn't seem Turing complete, but it is fairly sketchy).