At the end of his life he was an American, and a power behind the scenes of American scientific policy and
foreign policy. But that was only the last of several equally distinguished identities in different countries
and fields of thought. Janos Neumann, known as "Jansci," was a prodigious young chemical engineer turned
mathematician and logician in Hungary in the early 1920s. Johann von Neumann was one of the elite
quantum physics revolutionaries in Gottingen, Germany, in the late twenties. And from 1933 until his
death, he was John von Neumann of Princeton, New Jersey; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Washington,
D.C., known to professors and Presidents as "Johnny."
Ada and Babbage could only dream of the day their device could be put to work. Turing was a tragic victim
of political events before he could get his hands on a computer worth the name. Johnny, however, not only
managed to get his machines built and use them to create the first working principles of software -- but he
also ended up telling his government how to use the new technology. He was responsible for much more
than the first boost in accelerating American effort to develop computer technology.
A combination of many different scientific and political developments led to the invention of ENIAC.
Electronic tube technology, Boolean logic, Turing-type computation, Babbage-Lovelace programming, and
feedback-control theories were brought together because of the War Department's insatiable hunger for
raw calculating power.
John von Neumann was the only man who not only knew enough about the
scientific issues but moved comfortably enough in the societies of Princeton and Los Alamos and Washington
to grasp the threads and weave them together in an elegant and powerful design.
Von Neumann was a very important, probably indispensable, member of the Manhattan
Project scientific team. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Bohr, Lawrence, and the other members of the
most gifted scientific gathering of minds in history were as awed by Johnny's intellect as anyone else who
ever met him. More impressively, they were as reliant on his mathematical judgment as anyone else. In
that galactic cluster of world-class physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and engineers, it was a rare
tribute that von Neumann was put in charge of the mathematical calculations upon which all their
theories -- and the functioning of their "gadget" -- would depend.
As if his significant contributions to the development of the first nuclear weapons and the first computers
were not enough for one man, he was also one of the original logicians who had posed the questions that
Turing and Kurt G�del answered in the 1930s. He was a cofounder of the modern science of game theory
(picking up where Babbage left off), one of the founders of operational research (also, curiously, advancing
a field first explored by Babbage), an active participant in the creation of quantum physics, one of the first
people to suggest analogies and differences between computer circuits and brain processes, and one of the
first scientists since Turing to examine the relationship between the mathematics of code-making and the
mystery of biological reproduction.
Von Neumann ended up a key policy-maker in the fields of nuclear power,
nuclear weapons, and intercontinental ballistic weaponry:
he was the director of the Atomic Energy Commission and an influential member of the ICBM Committee.
Generals and senators were lucky to get an appointment. Even when he was dying, the most powerful men
in the world gathered around for a final consultation. According to Admiral Lewis Strauss, former
chairman of the Atomic Energy commission: "On one dramatic occasion near the end, there was a meeting
at Walter Reed Hospital where, gathered around his bedside and attentive to his last words of advice and
wisdom, were the secretary of Defense and his Deputies, the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air
Force, and all the military Chiefs of Staff."
John von Neumann's political views, undoubtedly rooted in his upper-class Hungarian past, were
unequivocal and extreme, according to the public record and his biographers.
He not only used his scientific expertise to hasten and accelerate the
development of nuclear weapons and computer-guided missiles, but counseled military and political leaders
to think about using these new American inventions against the USSR in a "preventive war."
(In an article in Life magazine, published shortly after he died, von Neumann was quoted as saying:
"If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say, why not today. If you say at five o'clock, I say why not
one o'clock.")
In contrast to Turing, whom he knew from Turing's prewar stay at Princeton and from their wartime work,
von Neumann was a sophisticated, worldly, and gregarious fellow, famous for the weekly cocktail parties
he and his wife hosted during his tenure at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and up on the Mesa at
Los Alamos. He had a substantial private income and an additional $10,000 a year from the Institute. He
was widely known to have a huge repertoire of jokes in several languages, a vast knowledge of risqu�
limericks, and a casual manner of driving so recklessly that he demolished automobiles at regular intervals,
always managing to emerge miraculously unscathed.
Despite his apparently charmed existence, von Neumann, like Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing, died relatively
young. Lovelace died of cancer at thirty-six, Turing of cyanide at forty-two, and von Neumann of cancer at
fifty-three. Like many other Los Alamos veterans, he may have been a victim of exposure to radiation
during the early nuclear bomb tests. His death came as a shock to all who knew him as a vital, lively,
peripatetic, seemingly invulnerable individual. Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann's mathematical colleague and
lifelong friend, in a memorial to Johnny published in a mathematical journal shortly after von Neumann's
death, described
his physical presence
in loving detail:
Johnny's friends remember him in his characteristic poses: standing before a blackboard or discussing
problems at home. Somehow his gesture, smile, and the expression of the eyes always reflected the
thought or the nature of the problem under discussion. He was of middle size, quite slim as a young man,
then increasingly corpulent; moving in small steps with considerable random acceleration, but never with
great speed. A smile flashed on his face whenever a problem exhibited features of a logical or
mathematical paradox. Quite independently of his liking for abstract wit, he had a strong appreciation (one
might almost say a hunger) for the more earthy type of comedy and humor.
Everyone who knew him remembers to point out two things about von Neumann -- how charming and
personable he was, no matter what language he was speaking, and how much more intelligent that other
human beings he always seemed to be, even in a crowd of near-geniuses. Among his friends,
the standard joke about Johnny was that he wasn't actually human but was as
skilled at imitating human beings as he was at everything else.
Born into an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family, Jansci was fluent in five or six languages before the age
of ten, and he once told his collaborator Herman Goldstine that at age six he and his father often joked with
each other in classical Greek. It was well known that he never forgot anything once he read it, and his
ability to perform lightning fast calculations was legendary.
One night in the middle of the summer of 1944, von Neumann encountered by happenstance a mathematician
of past acquaintance in the Aberdeen, Maryland, train station. History might have been far different if one
of their trains had been scheduled a few minutes earlier. That accidental meeting in Aberdeen presented
von Neumann with a nearly completed approach to a problem the strategic significance of which he was
uniquely equipped to understand, the details of which were complex and profound enough to attract his
intellectual curiosity, the successful completion of which could be hastened by the use of his political
clout.
Lieutenant Herman Goldstine, then associated with the U.S. Army Ordnance Ballistic Laboratory at
Aberdeen, Maryland, didn't know anything about the other projects von Neumann was juggling at that time.
But he knew that von Neumann's security clearance was miles above his and that he was a member of the
Scientific Advisory Committee at the Ballistic Research Laboratory. So Goldstine happened to mention that
an Army project at the Moore School of Engineering was soon to produce a device capable of performing
mathematical calculations at phenomenal speeds.
Years later, Goldstine remembered that he was understandably nervous upon meeting the world-famous
mathematician on the platform at the Aberdeen station. Goldstine recalled:
Fortunately for me, von Neumann was a warm friendly person who did his best to make people feel relaxed
in his presence. The conversation soon turned to my work. When it became clear to von Neumann that I
was concerned with the development of an electronic computer capable of 333 multiplications per second,
the whole atmosphere of our conversation changed from one of relaxed good humor to one more like the oral
examination for the doctor's degree in mathematics.
Because he had all-important reasons for wanting a fast automatic calculator, von Neumann asked for a
demonstration. At the Moore School of Engineering, he met the gadget's inventors, Mauchly and Eckert, and
the next years saw Johnny adding Aberdeen as a regular stop on his Princeton-D.C.-Los Alamos shuttle.
Like everything else he turned his mind to, von Neumann immediately seemed to see more clearly than
anyone else the future potential of what was then only a crude prototype. While the other principal
creators of the first electronic computer were either mathematicians or electrical engineers, von Neumann
was also a superb logician, which enabled him to understand what few others did -- that these gadgets
were in a class quite far beyond that of superfast calculating engines.
From those early meetings in 1944 to the eras of ENIAC, EDVAC, UNIVAC, MANIAC, and (yes) JOHNNIAC,
the
problem of assigning legal and historical credit to the inventors of the first
electronic digital computers
becomes a tangled affair in which easy explanations are impossible and many conflicts are still unresolved.
Goldstine -- the other man on the platform with von Neumann -- had his own version of the key events in early
computer history. Mauchly and Eckert had a distinctly different point of view. There was a tale of Stibitz
at Bell Labs. IBM's Thomas Watson, Senior, had yet another story. And a man in Iowa named Atanasoff eventually had the
unexpected last laugh in a courtroom in 1973.
Monumental court cases have been fought over the issue of assigning credit for the invention of the modern
computer, and even the legal decisions have been somewhat murky. Certainly it was a field in which a few
people all over the world, working independently, reached similar conclusions. In the case of the ENIAC
team, it was a case of several determined minds working together.
It isn't hard to envision von Neumann coming onto the scene after others have worked for years on the
considerable engineering problems involved in building ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Calculator), then dominating the voice of the group when they articulated their discoveries, not out of
self-aggrandizement, but because he undoubtedly had the most elegant way of stating the conclusions that
the group had arrived at, working in concert. Because of von Neumann's prominence in other fields, and the
way his charm worked on journalists as well as generals, he was often described by the mass media as the
sole inventor of key concepts like the all-important "stored program" -- a credit he never claimed
himself.
Although the matter of assigning credit for the earliest computer hardware is a tricky business, there is no
denying von Neumann's central role in the history of software. His contributions to the science of
computation in the late forties and early fifties were preceded by even earlier theoretical work that led to
the notion of computation. He was one of the principal participants in both of the lines of thought that
converged into the construction of ENIAC -- mathematical logic and ballistics.
John von Neumann's role in the invention of computation began nearly twenty years before the ENIAC
project. In the late 1920s, between his major contributions to quantum physics, logic, and game theory,
young Johann von Neumann of G�ttingen was one of the principal players in the international game of
mathematical riddles that started with Boole seventy years prior and led to Turing's invention of the
universal machine a decade later.
The impending collision of philosophy and mathematics that was becoming evident at the end of the
nineteenth century made mathematicians extremely uncomfortable. Slippery metaphysical concepts
associated with human thought might have appealed to minds like Boole's or Turing's. But to David Hilbert
of G�ttingen and others of the early 1900s, such vagueness was a grave danger to the future of an
enterprise that intended to reduce all scientific laws to mathematical equations.
The logical and metamathematical foundations of more "pure" forms of mathematics, Hilbert insisted, could
only be stated clearly in terms of numerical problems and precisely defined symbols and rules and
operations. This was the doctrine of formalism that later spurred Turing to make his astonishing
discovery about the capabilities of machines. Johann von Neumann, a student of Hilbert's, was one of the
stars of the formalists. In itself, von Neumann's metamathematical achievement was remarkable. His
work in formalism, however, was only part of what von Neumann achieved in several disparate fields, all
in the same dazzling year.
In 1927, at the age of twenty-four, von Neumann published five papers that
were instant hits in the academic world, and which still stand as monuments in three separate fields of
thought.
It was one of the most remarkable interdisciplinary triple plays in history. Three of his 1927 masterpieces
were critical to the field of quantum physics. Another paper established the new field of game theory. The
paper most directly to the future of computation was about the relationship between formal logic systems
and the limits of mathematics.
In his last 1927 paper, von Neumann demonstrated the necessity of proving that all mathematics was
consistent, a critically important step toward establishing the theoretical basis for computation (although
nobody yet knew that). This led, one year later, to a paper published by Hilbert that listed three
unanswered questions about mathematics that he and von Neumann had determined to be the most important
questions facing logicians and mathematics of the modern era.
The first of these questions asked whether or not mathematics was complete. Completeness, in the
technical sense used by mathematicians, means that every true mathematical statement can be proven (i.e.,
is the last line of a valid proof).
The second question, the one that most concerned von Neumann, asked whether mathematics (or any other
formal system) was consistent. Consistency in the technical sense means that there is no valid
sequence of allowable steps (or "moves" or "states") that could prove an untrue statement to be true. If
arithmetic was a consistent system, there would never be a way to prove that 1 + 1 = 3.
The third question, the one that opened the side door to computation, asked whether or not mathematics was
decidable. Decidability means that there is some definite method that is guaranteed to correctly
determine whether an assertion is provable.
It didn't take long for a shocking answer to emerge in response to the first Hilbert-von Neumann question.
In 1930, yet another young mathematician, Kurt G�del, showed that arithmetic cannot be complete, because
there will always be at least one true assertion that cannot be proved. In the course of demonstrating this,
G�del crossed a crucial threshold between logic and mathematics when he showed that any formal system
that is as rich as the number system (i.e., contains the mathematical operators + and =) can be expressed
in terms of arithmetic. This means that no matter how complicated mathematics (or any other equally
powerful formal system) becomes, it can always be expressed in terms of operations to be performed on
numbers, and the parts of the system (whether or not they are inherently numerical) can be manipulated by
rules of counting and comparing.
Von Neumann's and Hilbert's third question about the decidability of mathematics led Turing to his 1936
breakthrough. The "definite method" (of determining whether a mathematical assertion is provable) that
was demanded by the decidability question was formulated by Alan Turing as a machine that could operate in
definite steps on statements encoded as symbols on tape. G�del had shown how numbers could represent the
operations of formal system, and Turing showed how the formal system could be described numerically to a
machine equipped to decode such a description (e.g., translate the system's rules into the form "find a
number n, such that . . . ", "n" being expressible as a string of ones and zeroes).
All of these questions were terribly important at the time they were formulated -- to the few dozen people
around the world who were equipped to understand their significance. But in 1930, the rest of the
population had more important things to worry about that the hypothetical machines of the
metamathematicians. Even those who understood that universal machines could in fact be built were in no
position to begin such a task.
Making a digital computer was an engineering project that would require the
kind of support that only a national government could afford.
John von Neumann was at the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton by the time young G�del and Turing came along. Although he was keenly aware of the latest
developments in the "foundation crisis of mathematics" he had helped initiate in the late 1920s, von
Neumann's restless intellect was attacking half a dozen new problems by the early 1930s. To Johnny, still
in his twenties, the most important thing in life was to find "interesting problems."
In particular, he was interested in mathematical questions involving the phenomenon of turbulence, and the
dynamics of explosions and implosions happened to be one area where such questions could be applied. He
was also interested in new mathematical methods for modeling complex phenomena like global weather
patterns or the passage of radiation through matter -- methods that were powerful but required such
enormous numbers of calculations that future progress in the field was severely limited by the human
inability to calculate the results of the most interesting equations in a reasonable length of time.
Von Neumann seemed to have a kind of "Midas Touch."
The problems he tackled, no matter how abstruse and apparently obscure they might have seemed at the
time, had a way of becoming very important a decade or two later. For example, he wrote a paper in the
1920s on the mathematics underlying economic strategies. A quarter of a century later it turned out to be
a perfect solution to the problem of how airplanes should search for submarines (as well as one of the first
triumphs of "operational research," one of the fields pioneered by Babbage).
By the 1940s, von Neumann's expertise in the mathematics of hydrodynamic turbulence and the
management of very large calculations took on unexpected importance because these two specialties were
especially applicable to a new kind of explosion that was being cooked up by some of the old gang from
G�ttingen, now gathered in New Mexico. The designers of the first fission bomb knew that hellish
mathematical problems in both areas had to be solved before any of the elegant equations of quantum
physics could be transformed into the fireball of a nuclear detonation. As von Neumann already suspected,
the mathematical work involved in designing nuclear and thermonuclear weapons created an avalanche of
calculations.
The calculating power needed in the quest for thermonuclear weaponry ended up being one of the
highest-priority uses for ENIAC -- top-secret calculations for Los Alamos were the subject of the first
official programs run on the device when it became operational -- although
the reason the electronic calculator had been commissioned in the first place
was to generate the mathematical tables needed for properly aiming conventional artillery.
The ENIAC project was started under the auspices of the Army Ballistic Research Laboratory. Herman
Goldstine, a historian of computation as well as one of the key participants, took the trouble to point out
that the word ballistics is derived from the Latin ballista, the name of a large device for
hurling missiles. Ballistics in the modern sense is the mathematical science of predicting the path of a
projectile between the time it is launched and the moment it hits the target. Complex equations concerning
moving bodies are complicated further by the adjustments necessary for winds of different velocities and
for the variations in air resistance encountered by projectiles fired from very large guns as they travel
through the atmosphere. The results of all possible distance, altitude, and weather calculations for guns of
each specific size and muzzle velocity are given in "firing tables" which artillerymen consult as they set up
a shot.
The application of mass-production techniques to weapons meant that new types of guns and shells were
coming along at an unprecedented pace, making the ongoing production of firing tables no easy task. During
World War I, such calculations were done by humans who were called "computers." But even then it was
clear that new methods of organizing these large-scale calculations, and new kinds of mechanical
calculators to help the work of human computers, would be an increasingly important part of modern
warfare.
In 1918 the Ballistics Branch of the Chief of Ordnance set up a special mathematical section at the Aberdeen
Proving Ground in Maryland. One of the early recruits was the young Norbert
Wiener, who was to feature prominently in another research tributary of the mainstream of ballistic
technology -- the automatic control of antiaircraft guns -- and who was later to become one of the creators of
the new computer-related discipline of cybernetics.
In the 1930s, both the Aberdeen laboratory and an associated group at the University of Pennsylvania's
Moore School of Engineering obtained models of the automatic analog computer constructed by Vannevar Bush at MIT, a gigantic mechanical device known as the "differential
analyzer." It was a marvelous aid to calculation, but it was far from being a digital computer, in
either its design or its performance.
With the aid of these machines, the work of performing ballistic calculations was somewhat relieved.
Before World War II, the machines were still second to the main resource -- mathematics professors emeriti
at the Moore School, who performed the calculations by hand, with the aid of hand-cranked mechanical
calculators. Shades of Babbage's Cornish clergymen!
When war broke out, it was obvious that the institutions in charge of producing ballistic calculations for
several armed services needed expert help. It was for this reason that a mobilized mathematician,
Lieutenant Herman Goldstine, reported for duty at Aberdeen in August, 1942, and was assigned the task of
streamlining ballistic computations. He soon found the Moore School facilities inadequate, and started to
expand the staff of human "computers" by adding a large number of young women recruited from the
Women's Army Corps to the small cadre of elderly ex-professors.
Goldstine's wife, Adele, herself a mathematician who was to play a prominent role in the programming of
early computers (she and six other women were eventually assigned the task of programming the ENIAC),
became involved with recruiting and teaching new staff members. Von Neumann's wife, Klara, performed a
similar role at Los Alamos, both before and after electronic computing machines became available. The
tradition of using women for such work was widespread -- the equivalent roles in Britain's code-breaking
efforts were played by hundreds of skilled calculators whom Turing and his colleagues called "girls" as well
as "computers."
The expansion of the human computing staff at Aberdeen to nearly two hundred people, mostly WACs, was a
stopgap measure. The calculation of firing tables was already out of hand. As soon as a new kind of gun,
fuse, or shell became available for combat, a new table had to be calculated. The final product was either
printed in a booklet that gunners kept in their pockets, or was mechanically encoded in special aiming
apparatus called automata. (An entirely different mathematical research effort by Julian Bigelow,
Warren Weaver, and Norbert Wiener was to concentrate on the characteristics of these automatic aiming
machines.)
The answer to the firing table dilemma, as Goldstine was one of the first to recognize, was to commission
the invention of an entirely new kind of mechanical calculating aid. The Vannevar Bush calculators were no
longer the most efficient calculating devices. Faster machines, built on different principles, had been built
by Dr. Howard Aiken and an IBM team at Harvard, and by a group led by a man named George Stibitz at Bell
laboratories. But Goldstine knew that what they really needed at Aberdeen and the Moore School was an
automatic calculator that was hundreds, even thousands of times faster than the fastest existing
machines.
Such dreams would have been akin to an Air Force officer wishing for a ten-thousand-mile-per-hour
airplane, except for the fact that another new technology, one that only a few people even thought of
applying to mathematical problems, looked as if it might make such a machine possible in theory, if only
questionably probable in execution. Research in the young field of electronics had been uncovering all sorts
of marvelous properties of the vacuum tube. Over in Great Britain, the whiz kids at Bletchley Park were
using such devices in Colossus, their not-quite-computational code-breaking machine.
Until the war, electronic vacuum tubes had been used almost exclusively as amplifiers. But they could also
be used as very fast switches.
Since the rapid execution of a large number of on/off impulses is the hallmark
of digital computation,
and vacuum tubes could switch on and off as fast as a million times a second, electronic switching (as
opposed to the mechanical switching of Vannevar Bush's machine) was an unbelievably good candidate for
the key component of an ultrafast computing machine.
By 1943, unknown to Goldstine and almost all of his superiors, another, much higher-ranking scientist was
also searching for an ultrafast computing machine. Goldstine beat the other fellow to it. Goldstine found
Mauchly and Eckert in 1942. John von Neumann, and chance, found Goldstine in 1944.
John W. Mauchly and J.
Presper Eckert have been properly credited with the invention of ENIAC, but before they implemented
the key ideas of electronic digital computing machines, a man named Atanasoff in Iowa, in the 1930s, built
small, crude, but functioning prototypes of electronic calculating machines. His name has not been as
widely known, and his fortunes turned out differently from those of other pioneers when computers grew
from an exotic newborn technology to a powerful infant industry. But in 1973 a Unites Stated district
court ruled that John Vincent Atanasoff invented the electronic digital computer.
It was a complicated decision, reached after years of litigation, and was not as clear-cut as it might have
been if both did not have such strong cases. The core of the dispute centered around original work
Atanasoff did in the 1930s, and the influence that his work later had on John Mauchly's design of ENIAC.
Like the Hollerith-Billings story of the invention of punched-card data processing, simple explanations of
where one man's ideas left off and another's began are difficult to reconstruct at best.
Atanasoff was the last of the lone inventors in the field of
computation; after him, such projects were too complicated for anything less than a team effort.
Like Boole, Atanasoff was the recipient of one of those sudden inspirations that provided the solution to a
problem he had been grappling with for years. A theoretical physicist teaching at Iowa State in the early
1930s, he came up against the same obstacle faced by other mathematicians and physicists of his era. The
approaches to the most interesting ideas were blocked by the problems of performing large numbers of
complex calculations.
By 1935, Atanasoff was in hot pursuit of a scheme to mechanize calculation. He was aware of Babbage's
ideas, but he was an electronic hobbyist as well as a physicist, and entire technologies that didn't exist in
Babbage's time were now showing great promise. Atanasoff was gradually convinced that an electronic
computing machine was a good bet to pursue, but he had no idea how to go about designing one, and he wasn't
sure how to design a machine without working out a method of programming it. In the late 1970s,
Atanasoff told writer Katherine Fishman:
I commenced to go into torture. For the next two years my life was hard. I thought and thought about this.
Every evening I would go into my office in the physics building. One night in the winter of 1937 my whole
body was in torment from trying to solve the problems of the machine. I got in my car and drove at high
speeds for a long while so I could control my emotions. It was my habit to do this for a few miles: I could
gain control of myself by concentrating on driving. But that night I was excessively tormented, and I kept
on going until I had crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois and was 189 miles from where I started. I
knew I had to quit; I saw a light, which turned out to be a roadhouse, and I went in. It was probably zero
outside, and I remember hanging up my heavy coat; I started to drink and commenced to warm up and
realized that I had control of myself.
Nearly forty years later, when he testified in the patent case concerning the invention of the electronic
computer, Atanasoff recalled that he decided upon several design elements and principles that night in the
roadhouse -- including a binary system for encoding input and electronic tube technology for switching -- that
would transform his dream of an electronic calculator into a practical plan.
The state of each inventor's mind at the time of their discussions in 1940 and 1941 was the crux of the
legal and historical conflict. There is no dispute that John Mauchly had also devoted years of thought to the
idea of automated calculation. Thirty-three years old when he met Atanasoff, Mauchly had worked his way
through Johns Hopkins as a research assistant, which gave him extensive experience with procedures that
involve detailed measurement and calculation. In 1933, as head of the physics department at Ursinus
College near Philadelphia, he began to perform research in atmospheric electricity.
Mauchly was particularly interested in the long-disputed theory about the effect of sunspots on the earth's
weather. There was no obvious connection between these huge storms on the sun and terrestrial weather
conditions, but that did not prove that such a connection did not exist. In 1936, Mauchly arranged to have
many parts of the government's voluminous meteorological records shipped back to his office at Ursinus.
He intended to apply modern statistical analysis to the weather data in an attempt to correlate them with
records of sunspot activity, hoping that this probe would reveal the previously undetected pattern.
As other mathematical meteorologists like von Neumann were also quickly discovering, Mauchly found that
any calculations involving data based on weather quickly grew so complicated that it would take a lifetime
to calculate all the equations generated from even the shortest periods of observation. So he found himself
doing the same thing that the ballistics experts did -- hiring a lot of people with adding machines. A
Depression-era agency, the National Youth Administration, helped Mauchly pay students fifty cents an hour
to tabulate his weather data with hand calculators. Mauchly planned to obtain punched-card machines, once
he got his crew to tackle the first part of the data. But when he watched a demonstration of the world's
most advanced punched-card tabulator at the 1939 World's Fair, he realized that even scores of such
machines in the hands of trained operators might take another decade to go through the weather data.
In 1939 and 1940, Mauchly read in scientific journals about a new measuring and counting system
developed to assist cosmic-ray research. The part of the system that caught his eye was the fact that this
new device, using electronic circuits, could count cosmic rays far faster than a dozen of the fasted
punched-card tabulators. Cosmic rays can be detected at the rate of thousands per second, but all previous
recorders failed to keep pace beyond 500 times a second. Mauchly tried making a few electronic circuits
for himself, and he began to see a way that they could be used for computation.
Mauchly took note of one circuit in particular that was developed by the cosmic-ray researchers -- the
coincidence circuit, in which a switch would be closed only when several signals arrived at exactly
the same time, thus, in effect, rendering a decision. Would a machine capable of making electronic logical
operations be possible via some variation of this circuit? Experimenting with his own vacuum-tube
circuits, Mauchly speculated that there might also exist circuits used in other kinds of instruments that
would enable him to build a machine to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. At this point his speculations
were more grandiose than his hand-wired prototypes, but the clues he had obtained from the cosmic-ray
researchers were enough to put Mauchly's weather-predicting machines on a collision course with a certain
device the U.S. Army had in mind, one that had nothing to do with sunspots or the weather.
Mauchly brought a small analog device to the AAAS meeting where he met Atanasoff, and in June, 1941, he
hitched a ride to visit Atanasoff in Ames, Iowa. Atanasoff demonstrated the ABC, Mauchly stayed for five
days, and thirty-two years later a court decided that Mauchly's later invention of the ENIAC relied upon
key ideas of Atanasoff's that were transferred from mind to mind those five days in June.
The 1973 legal decision (Honeywell versus Sperry Rand, U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota,
Fourth Division) did not state that Mauchly stole anything, but did restore partial credit for the invention of
the electronic computer to a man whose name had been nearly forgotten in all the publicity and honors
heaped upon Mauchly and Eckert. After the ruling, Mauchly said: "I feel I got nothing out of that visit to
Atanasoff except the royal shaft later." On Mauchly's behalf, it must be noted that nobody
has disputed the fact that the sheer scale and engineering audacity of ENIAC was far beyond the ABC, and
that Mauchly was indeed on the right track at least as early as Atanasoff.
Part of the reason for ENIAC's success and ABC's obscurity must be attributed to the accidents of history.
Legal issues aside, the historical momentum shifted to Mauchly later in the summer of 1941, when he
signed up for an Army-sponsored electronics course at the Moore School of Engineering. His instructor, J.
Presper Eckert, was an exceptionally bright Philadelphia blueblood twelve years younger than Mauchly.
When Eckert, the electronics wizard, learned of Mauchly's plan to automate large-scale numerical
calculations, a critical mass of idea-power was reached. They were in exactly the right place at the right
time to cook up such an ambitious project.
Not long after thirty-four-year-old John Mauchly and twenty-two-year-old Pres Eckert started to sketch
out a plan for an electronic computer, they became acquainted with Lieutenant Herman Goldstine, both as a
mathematician and as a liaison officer between the Moore School and the Ballistic Research Laboratory. By
the time he met them,
Goldstine was sufficiently frustrated by the lack of ballistic computing power
that he was receptive to even a science-fiction story like the one presented to him by these two whiz
kids.
As wild as it sounded as an engineering feat, Goldstine knew that an electronic device such as the one
Mauchly and Eckert described to him had the potential to perform ballistic calculations over 1000 times
faster than the best existing machine, the Aiken-IBM-Harvard-Navy device called the Mark I. But it would
cost a lot of money to find out if they were right. Atanasoff and Berry built their prototype for a total of $6500. These boys would
need hundreds of thousands of dollars to lash together something so complicated and delicate that most
electrical engineers of the time would swear it could never work.
Goldstine later explained the risks associated with attempting the proposed electronic calculator project:
. . . we should realize that the proposed machine turned out to contain over 17,000 tubes of 16 different
types operating at a fundamental clock rate of 100,000 pulses per second. . . .
once every 10 microseconds an error would occur if a single one of the
17,000 tubes operated incorrectly; this means that in a single second there were 1.7 billion . . . chances
of a failure occurring . . . Man has never made an instrument capable of operating with this degree of
fidelity or reliability, and this is why the undertaking was so risky a one and the accomplishment so
great.
The two young would-be computer inventors at the Moore School, the mathematician-turned-lieutenant who
found them, and their audacious plan for cutting through the calculation problem by creating the world's
most complicated machine were the subject of a high-level meeting on April 9, 1943. Attending was one of
the original founders of the military's mathematical research effort and President of the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton, Oswald Veblen, as well as Colonel Leslie Simon, director of the Ballistic
Research Laboratory, and Goldstine.
The moment when the United States War Department entered the age-old quest for a computing machine, and
thus made the outcome inevitable, was recalled by Goldstine when he wrote, nearly thirty years later, that
Veblen, "after listening for a short while to my presentation and teetering on the back legs of his chair
brought the chair down with a crash, arose, and said, 'Simon, give Goldstine the money.'" They got their
money -- eventually as much as $400,000 -- and started building their machine.
ENIAC was monstrous -- 100 feet long, 10 feet high, 3 feet deep, weighing 30
tons -- and hot enough to keep the room temperature up toward 120 degrees F while it shunted multivariable
differential equations through its more than 17,000 tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and
6,000 hand-set switches. It used an enormous amount of power -- the apocryphal story is that the lights of
Philadelphia dimmed when it was plugged in.
When it was finally completed, ENIAC was too late to use in the war, but it certainly delivered what its
inventors had promised: a ballistic calculation that would have taken twenty hours for a skilled human
calculator could be accomplished by the machine in less than thirty seconds. For the first time, the
trajectory of a shell could be calculated in less time than it took an actual shell to travel to its target. But
the firing tables were no longer the biggest boom on the block by the time ENIAC was completed. The first
problem run on the machine, late in the winter of 1945, was a trial calculation for the hydrogen bomb then
being designed.
After his first accidental meeting with Goldstine at Aberdeen, and the demonstration of a prototype ENIAC
soon afterward, von Neumann joined the Moore School project as a special consultant. Johnny's genius for
formal, systematic, logical thinking was applied to the logical properties of this huge maze of electronic
circuits. The engineering problems were still formidable, but it was becoming clear that the nonphysical
component, the subtleties of setting up the machine's operations -- the coding, as they began to call
it -- was equally difficult and important.
Until the transistor came along a few years later, ENIAC would represent the physical upper limit of what
could be done with a large number of high-speed switches. In 1945, the most promising approach to greater
computing power was in improving the logical structure of the machine. And von Neumann was probably the
one man west of Bletchley Park equipped to understand the logical attributes of the first digital
computer.
Part of the reason ENIAC was able to operate so fast was that the routes followed by the electronic
impulses were wired into the machine. This electronic routing was the materialization of the machine's
instructions for transforming the input data into the solution. Many different kinds of equations could be
solved, and the performance of a calculation could be altered by the outcome of subproblems,
but ENIAC was nowhere near as flexible as Babbage's Analytical Engine, which
could be reprogrammed to solve a different set of equations, not by altering the machine itself, but by
altering the sequence of input cards.
What Mauchly and Eckert gained in calculating power and speed, they paid for
in overall flexibility. The gargantuan electronic machine had to be set up for solving each separate problem
by changing the configuration of a huge telephone-like switchboard, a procedure that could take
days.
The origins of the device as a ballistics project were partially responsible for this inflexibility. It was not
the intention of the Moore School engineers to build a universal machine. Their contract quite clearly
specified that they create an altogether new kind of trajectory calculator.
Especially after von Neumann joined the team, they realized that what they were constructing would not
only become the ultimate mathematical calculator, but the first, necessarily imperfect prototype of a whole
new category of machine. Before ENIAC was completed, its designers were already planning a successor.
Von Neumann, especially, began to realize that what they were talking about was a general-purpose
machine, one that was by its nature particularly well suited to function as an extension of the human
mind.
If one thing was sacred to Johnny, it was the power of human thought to penetrate the mysteries of the
universe, and the will of human beings to apply that knowledge to practical ends. He had other things on his
own mind at the time -- from the secrets of H-bomb design to the structure of logic machines -- but he
appeared to be most keen on the idea that these devices might evolve into some kind of intellectual
extension. How much more might a thinker like himself accomplish with the aid of such a machine? One
biographer put it this way:
Von Neumann's enthusiasm in 1944 and 1945 had first been generated by the challenge of improving the
general-purpose computer. He had been a proponent of using the latest in computing machines in the atomic
bomb project, but he realized that for the impending hydrogen bomb project still better and faster machines
were needed. In the theoretical level he was intrigued by the fact that there appeared to be organizational
parallels between the brain and computers and that these parallels might lead to formal-logic theories
encompassing both computers and brains; moreover, the logical theories would constitute interesting
abstract logics in their own right. He was cautious in assuming similarity between a computer and the
awesome functioning of the human brain, especially as in 1944 he had little preparation in physiology.
Rather he regarded the computer as a technical device functioning as an
extension of its user; it would lead to an aggrandizement of the human brain, and von Neumann wanted to
push this aggrandizement as far and as fast as possible.
There is no dispute that Mauchly, Eckert, Goldstine, and Von Neumann worked together as a team during this
crucial gestation period of computer technology. The team split up in 1946, however, so the matter of
accrediting specific ideas has become a sticky one. Memoranda were written, as they are on any project,
without the least expectation that years later they would be regarded as historical or legal documents.
Technology was moving too fast for the traditional process of peer review and publication: the two most
important documents from these early days were titled "First Draft . . ." and "Preliminary Report . . ."
By the time they got around to sketching the design for the next electronic computer, the four main ENIAC
designers had agreed that the goal was to design a machine that would use the same hardware technology in
a more efficient way. The next step, the invention of stored programming, is where the
accreditation controversy comes in. At the end of June, 1945, the ENIAC team prepared a proposal in the
form of a "First Draft of a Report on the Electronic Discrete Variable Calculator" (EDVAC). It was signed
by von Neumann, but reflected the conclusions of the group. Goldstine later said of this: "It has been said
by some that von Neumann did not give credits in his First Draft to others. The reason for this was
that the document was intended by von Neumann as a working paper for use in clarifying and
coordinating the thinking of the group and was not intended for publication." (Mauchly and Eckert, however, took a less benign
view of von Neumann's intentions.) The most significant innovations articulated in this paper involved the
logical aspects of coding, as well as dealing with the engineering of the physical device that was to follow
the coded instructions.
Creating the coded instructions for a new computation on ENIAC was nowhere near as time consuming as
carrying out the calculation by hand. Once the code for the instructions needed to carry out the calculation
had been drawn up, all that had to be done to perform the computation on any set of input data was to
properly configure the machine to perform the instructions. The calculation, which formerly took up the
most time, had become trivial, but a new bottleneck was created with the resetting of switches, a process
that took an unreasonable amount of time compared with the length of time it would take to run the
calculation.
Resetting the switches was the most worrisome bottleneck, but not the only one. The amount of time it
took for the instructions to make use of the data, although greatly reduced from the era of manual
calculation, was also significant -- in ballistics, the ultimate goal of automating calculation was to be able to
predict the path of a missile before it landed, not days or hours or even just minutes later. If only
there was a more direct way for the different sets of instructions -- the inflexible, slow-to-change
component of the computing system -- to interact with the data stored in the electronic memory, the more
quickly accessible component of computation. The solution, as von Neumann and colleagues formulated it,
was an innovation based upon a logical breakthrough.
The now-famous "First Draft" described the logical properties of a true general-purpose electronic digital
computer. In one key passage, the EDVAC draft pointed out something that Babbage, if not Turing, had
overlooked: "The device requires a considerable memory. While it appears that various parts of this
memory have to perform functions which differ somewhat in their nature and considerably in their purpose,
it is nevertheless tempting to treat the entire memory as one organ." In other words, a general-purpose computer should
be able to store instructions in its internal memory, along with data.
What used to be a complex configuration of switchboard settings could be symbolized by the programmer in
the form of a number and read by the computer as the location of an instruction stored in memory, an
instruction that would automatically be applied to specified data that was also stored in memory.
This meant that the program could call up other programs, and even modify
other programs, without intervention by the human operator. Suddenly, with this simple change, true
information processing became possible.
This is the kernel of the concept of stored programming, and although the ENIAC team was officially the first to
describe an electronic computing device in such terms, it should be noted that the abstract version of
exactly the same idea was proposed in Alan Turing's 1936 paper in the form of the single tape of the
universal Turing machine. And at the same time the Pennsylvania group was putting together the EDVAC
report, Turing was thinking again about the concept of stored programs:
So the spring of 1945 saw the ENIAC team on one hand, and Alan Turing on the other, arrive naturally at
the idea of constructing a universal machine with a single "tape." . . .
But when Alan Turing spoke of "building a brain," he was working and thinking alone in his spare time,
pottering around in a British back garden shed with a few pieces of equipment grudgingly conceded by the
secret service. He was not being asked to provide the solution to numerical problems such as those von
Neumann was engaged upon; he had been thinking for himself. He had simply put together things that no one
had put together before: his one tape universal Turing machine, the knowledge that large scale pulse
technology could work, and the experience of turning cryptanalytic thought into "definite methods" and
"mechanical processes." Since 1939 he had been concerned with little but symbols, states, and instruction
tables -- and with the problem of embodying these as effectively as possible in concrete forms.
With the EDVAC design, ballistics calculators took the first step toward general-purpose computers, and it
became clear to a few people that such devices would surely evolve into something far more powerful.
The kind of uses the inventors envisioned for the future of their technology
was a cause for one of several major theoretical disagreements
that were to surface soon thereafter among the four ENIAC principals. Von Neumann and Goldstine saw the
opportunity to build an incredibly powerful research tool for scientists and mathematicians. Mauchly and
Eckert were already thinking of business and government applications outside military or research
institutions.
The first calculation run on ENIAC in December, 1945, six months after the "First Draft," was a problem
posed by scientists from Los Alamos Laboratories. ENIAC was formally dedicated in February, 1946. By
then, the patriotic solidarity enforced upon the research team by wartime conditions had faded away. Von
Neumann was enthusiastic about the military and scientific future of the computer-building enterprise, but
the two young men who had dreamed up the computer project before the big brass stepped in were getting
other ideas about how their brain-child ought to mature. The tensions between institutions, people, and
ideas mounted until Mauchly and Eckert left the Moore School on March 31, 1946, over a dispute with the
university concerning patent rights to ENIAC. They founded their own group shortly thereafter,
eventually naming it The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation.
When Mauchly and Eckert later suggested that they were, in fact, the sole originators of the EDVAC report,
they were, in Goldstine's phrase, "strenuously opposed" by Goldstine and von Neumann. The split turned
out to be a lifelong feud. Goldstine, writing in 1972 from his admittedly partial perspective, was
unequivocal in pointing out von Neumann's contributions:
First, his entire summary as a unit constitutes a major contribution and had a profound impact not only on
the EDVAC but also served as a model for virtually all future studies of logical design. Second, in that
report he introduced a logical notion adapted from one of McCulloch and Pitts, who used it in a study of the
nervous system. This notation became widely used, and is still, in modified form, an important and indeed
essential way for describing pictorially how computer circuits behave from a logical point of view.
Third, in the famous report he proposed a repertoire of instructions for the EDVAC, and in a subsequent
letter he worked out a detailed programming for a sort and merge routine. This represents a
milestone, since it is the first elucidation of the now famous stored program concept together with a
completely worked-out illustration.
Fourth, he set forth clearly the serial mode of operation of the modern computer, i.e., one instruction at a
time is inspected and then executed. This is in sharp distinction to the parallel operation of the ENIAC in
which many things are simultaneously performed.
While Mauchly and Eckert set forth to establish the commercial applications of computer technology,
Goldstine, von Neumann, and another mathematician by the name of Arthur Burks put together a proposal
and presented it to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Radio Corporation of America, and
the Army Ordnance Department, requesting one million dollars to build an advanced electronic digital
computer. Once again, some of the thinking in this project was an extension of the group creations of the
ENIAC project. But this "Preliminary Discussion," unquestionably dominated by von Neumann, also went
boldly beyond the EDVAC conception as it was stated in the "First Draft."
Although the latest proposal was aimed at the construction of a machine that would be more sophisticated
than EDVAC, the authors went much farther than describing a particular machine. They very strongly
suggested that their specification should be of the general plan for the logical structure and fundamental
method of operation for all future computers. They were right:
it took almost forty years, until the 1980s until anyone made a serious
attempt to build "non-von Neumann machines."
"Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument," which has since
been recognized
as the founding document of the modern science of electronic computer
design,
was submitted on June 28, 1946, but was available only in the form of mimeographed copies of the original
report to the Ordnance Department until 1962, when a condensed version was published in
Datamation magazine.
The primary contributions of this document were related to the logical use of the memory mechanism and
the overall plan of what has been come to be known as the "logical architecture." One aspect of this
architecture was the ingenious way data and instructions were made to be changeable during the course of a
computation without requiring direct intervention by the human operator.
This changeability was accomplished by treating numerical data as "values" that could be assigned to
specific locations in memory. The basic memory component of an EDVAC-type computer used collections of
memory elements known as "registers" to store numerical values in the form of a series of on/off
impulses. Each of these numbers was assigned an "address" in the memory, and any address could contain
either data or an instruction. In this way, specific data and instructions could be located when needed by
the control unit. One result of this was that a particular piece of data could be a variable -- like the x
in algebra -- that could be changed independently by having the results of an operation stored at the
appropriate address, or by telling the computer to perform an operation on whatever was found at that
location.
One of the characteristics of any series of computation instructions is a reference to data: when the
instructions tell the machine how to perform a calculation, they have to specify what data to plug into the
calculation. By making the reference to data a reference to the contents of a specific memory location,
instead of a reference to a specific number, it became possible for the data to change during the course of a
computation, according to the results of earlier steps. It is in this way that the numbers stored in the
memory can become symbolic of quantities other than just numerical value, in the same way that algebra
enables one to manipulate symbols like x and y without specifying the values.
It is easier to visualize the logic of this schema if you think of the memory addresses as something akin to
numbered cubbyholes or post-office boxes -- each address is nothing but a place to find a message. The
addresses serve as easily located containers for the (changeable) values (the "messages") to be found
inside them. Box #1, for example, might contain a number; box #2 might contain another number; box #3
might contain instructions for an arithmetic operation to be performed on the numbers found in boxes #1
and #2; box #4 might contain the operation specified in box #3. The numbers in the first two boxes might
be fixed numbers, or they might be variables, the values of which might depend on the result of other
operations.
By putting both the instructions and the raw data inside the same memory, it became possible to perform
computations much faster than with ENIAC, but it also became necessary to devise a way to clearly indicate
to the machine that some specific addresses contain instructions and other addresses contain numbers for
those instructions to operate on.
In the "First Draft," von Neumann specified that each instruction should be designated in the coding of a
program by a number that begins with the digit 1, and each of the numbers (data) should begin with the
digit 0. The "Preliminary Report" expanded the means of distinguishing instructions from data by stating
that computers would keep these two categories of information separate by operating during two different
time cycles, as well.
All the instructions are executed according to a timing scheme based on the ticking of a built-in clock. The
"instruction" cycles and "execution" cycles alternate: On "tick," the machine's control unit interprets
numbers brought to it as instructions, and prepares to execute the operations specified by the instructions
on "tock," when the "execution" cycle begins and the control unit interprets input as data to operate
upon.
The plan for this new category of general-purpose computer not only specified a timing scheme but set
down what has become known as the "architecture" of the computer -- the division of logical functions among
physical components. The scheme had similarities to both Babbage's and Turing's models. All such
machines, the authors of the "Preliminary Report" declared, must have a unit where arithmetic and logical
operations can be performed (the processing unit where actual calculation takes place, equivalent to
Babbage's "mill"), a unit where instructions and data for the current problem can be stored (like Babbage's
"store," a kind of temporary memory device), a unit that executes the instructions according to the
specified sequential order (like the "read/write head" of Turing's theoretical machine), and a unit where
the human operator can enter raw information or see the computed output (what we now call "input-output
devices").
Any machine that adheres to these principles -- no matter what physical
technology is used to implement these logical functions -- is an example of what has become known as "the
von Neumann architecture."
It doesn't matter whether you build such a machine out of gears and springs, vacuum tubes, or transistors,
as long as its operations follow this logical sequence. This theoretical template was first implemented in
the Unites States at the Institute for Advanced Study. Modified copies of the IAS machine were made for
the Rand Corporation, an Air Force spinoff "think tank" that was responsible for keeping track of targets
for the nation's new but fast-growing nuclear armory, and for the Los Alamos Laboratory. Against von
Neumann's mild objections, the Rand machine was dubbed JOHNNIAC. The Los Alamos machine assigned to
nuclear weapons-related calculations was given the strangely uneuphemistic name of MANIAC.
(Neither EDVAC, the IAS machine, the Los Alamos machine, nor the Rand machine was the first operational example
of a fully functioning stored-program computer. British computer builders, who had been pursuing parallel
research and who were aware of Von Neumann's ideas, beat the Americans when it came to constructing a
machine based on the logical principles enunciated by von Neumann. The first machine that was binary,
serial, and used stored-program memory was EDSAC -- the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator,
built at the University Mathematical Laboratory, University of Cambridge, England.)
In a von Neumann machine, the arithmetic and logic unit is where the basic operations of the system are
wired in. All the other instructions are constructed out of these fundamentals. It is possible, in principle,
to build a device of this type with very few, extremely simple, built-in operations. Addition, for example,
could be performed over and over again whenever a multiplication operation is requested by a program. In
fact, the only two operations that are absolutely necessary are "not" and "and."
The problem with using a few very simple hardwired operations and
proportionally complex software structures built from them is that it slows down the operation of the
computer: Because instructions are executed one at a time ("serially") as the internal clock ticks, the
number of basic instructions in a program dictates how long it takes a computer to run that
program.
The control unit specified by the "Preliminary Report" -- the component that supervises the execution of
instructions -- was the materialization of the formal logic device created by Emil L. Post and Turing, who
had proved that it was possible to devise codes in terms of numbers that could cause a machine to solve any
problem that was clearly statable. This is where the symbol meets the signal, where sequences of on and
off impulses in the circuits, the Xs and Os on the cells of the endless tape, the strings of numbers in the
programmer's code, marry the human-created computation to the machine that computes.
The input-output devices were the parts of the system that were to advance the most slowly while the
switch-based memory, arithmetic, and control components ascended through orders of magnitude. For over
a decade after ENIAC, punched cards were the main input devices, and for over two decades, teletype
machines were the most common output devices.
The possibility of future breakthroughs in this area and their implications were not overlooked. In a
memorandum written in November, 1945, concerning one of the early proposals for the IAS machine, von
Neumann anticipated the possibility of creating a more visually oriented output device:
In many cases the output really desired is not digital (presumably printed) but pictorial (graphed). In such
situations the machine should graph it directly, especially because graphing can be done electronically and
hence more quickly than printing. The natural output in such a case is an oscilloscope, i.e., a picture on its
fluorescent screen. In some cases these pictures are wanted for permanent storage . . . in others only
visual inspection is desired. Both alternatives should be provided for.
But a personal interactive computer, helpful as such a device might be to a mind such as von Neumann's,
was not an interesting enough problem. After solving interesting problems about the processes that take
place in the heart of stars, a scientific-technological tour de force that also became a historical point of no
return when the scientists' employers demonstrated their creation at Hiroshima, and then solving another
set of problems concerned with the creation of computing machinery, all the while pontificating about the
most potent aspects of foreign policy to the leaders of the most powerful nation in history, John von
Neumann was aiming for nothing less than the biggest secret of all. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the
most interesting scientific question of the day was "what is life?"
To someone who had been at Alamogordo and the Moore School, it would not have been too farfetched to
believe that the next intellectual conquest might bring the secret of physical immortality within reach.
Certainly he would never know whether he could truly resolve the most awesome of nature's mysteries
until
he set his mind to decoding the secret of life.
And that he did. Characteristically, von Neumann focused on the aspect of the mystery of life that appealed
to his dearest instincts and most powerful capacities -- the pure, logical, mathematical underpinnings of
nature's code. He was particularly interested in the logical properties of the theoretical devices known as
automata, of which Turing's machine was an example.
Von Neumann was especially drawn to the idea of self-reproducing automata -- mathematical patterns
in space and time that had the property of being able to reproduce themselves. He was able to draw on his
knowledge of computers, his growing understanding of neurophysiology and biology, and make particularly
good use of his deep understanding of logic, because he saw self-replicating automata as essentially logical
beasts. The way the task was accomplished by living organisms of the type found on earth was only one way
it could be done. In principle, the task could be done by a machine that could follow a plan, because the plan,
and not the mechanism that carried it out, was a part of the system with the special, heretofore
mysterious property that distinguished life from nonliving matter.
Von Neumann approached "cellular automata" on an abstract level, just as Turing did with his first
machines. As early as 1948, he showed that any self-replicating system must have raw materials, a
program that provides instructions, an automaton that follows the instructions and arranges the symbols in
the cells of a Turing-type machine, a system for duplicating instructions, and a supervisory unit -- which
turned out to be an excellent description of the DNA direction of protein synthesis in living cells.
Another thing that interested Johnny was the gamelike aspect of the world. Accordingly, he thought about
the way his self-reproducing automaton was like a game:
Making use of the work done by his colleague Stanislav Ulam, von Neumann was able to refine his
calculations and make them more generally applicable. Von Neumann's mental experiment, which we can
easily present in the form of a game, makes use of a homogeneous space subdivided by cells. We can think
of these cells as squares on a playing board. A finite number of states -- e.g., empty, occupied, or occupied
by a specific color -- is assigned to a square. At the same time, a neighborhood is defined for each cell. This
neighborhood can consist of either the four orthogonally bordering cells or the eight orthogonally and
diagonally bordering cells. In the space divided up this way, transition rules are applied simultaneously to
each cell. The transition any particular cell undergoes will depend on its state and on the states of its
neighbors. Von Neumann was able to prove that a configuration of about 200,000 cells, each with 29
different possible states and each placed in a neighborhood of 4 orthogonally adjacent squares, could meet
all the requirements of a self-reproducing automaton. The large number of elements was necessary
because von Neumann's model was also designed to simulate a Turing machine. Von Neumann's machine can,
theoretically, perform any mathematical operation.
In 1950, when it was evident to all that the engineering phase of computer technology was accomplishing
impressive tasks,
von Neumann postulated one such system in terms of a factory that contains
within it the machinery and the detailed blueprints for making identical factories (and identical blueprints)
from raw materials provided to it.
Take that a step up in complexity, and the details can include a specification for subsystems that find raw
materials for the factory from the environment, with no human intervention.
If one fantasizes one step farther on the complexity spectrum, the instructions and capabilities could
specify factories capable of building spaceships to send more spaceships to other planets, where the raw
materials found would be shaped into more factory-spaceship-launchpad systems, and if you could build
factories that could build two or more such complexes, you could have a counterforce to the
generally disorderly trend of the cosmos,
in the form of a (mindless?) horde of factory-building factories, munching
outward through the galaxies like an anti-entropic swarm of logical locusts.
While it definitely sounds like a science-fiction story, and many would add that it could be interpreted to be
an idea of such inhuman coldness as to be termed "fiendish" such scenarios are legitimate topics in the field
of automata, and are still known as "von Neumann machines" (as distinguished from "the von Neumann
machine," the logical architecture he created for digital computers).
Von Neumann died in 1957, before he could achieve a breakthrough in the field of automata. Like Ada, he
died of cancer, and like Ada, he was said to have suffered terribly, as much from the loss of his intellectual
facilities as from pain. But the world he left behind him was powerfully rearranged by what he had
accomplished before he failed to solve his last, perhaps most interesting problem.
