Plan9 was a network operating system, and with a focus on concurrency a new language Alef was designed with coroutines based on CSP formalism (Hoare's communicating sequential processes). That was redesigned in Limbo language on Dis garbage collected virtual machine in plan9's replacement Inferno OS. Go's goroutines and other choices are next incarnation of these ideas designed by many the same Bell Labs people, not just one incidental lead. Shopping for a light compiler to bootstrap from is peripheral to the design story here.
Fuchsia doesn't share as much of the story but does pick up where in Dante's Inferno the original Unix people tried to abandon the root user to redeem themselves almost 30 years ago. Combined with capability based model last seen deployed in the wild with OS/400 and Burroughs machines before that, it would be the first truly new OS in decades.
Book already referenced by GP, click your links. These are old classic conference proceedings edited by Zurek https://archive.org/details/ComplexityEntropyAndThePhysicsOf... but it’s a mixed bag unless you really fancy EG quantum field theorist’s opinions on workings of visual cortex.
Thanks for posting it! It's unfortunate that the entry doesn't include the ISBN number [0], and that it consequently doesn't turn up when searching for that number
[0] I consider "ISBN number" to be a reasonable expression, with the interpretation "the number that goes by the name _ISBN_".
Cool book for sure, but I was thinking of something which would mention stuff like Rovelli's forays into Information theories of QM, or that crazy paper I found in the library once and lost completely which posited quantum entanglement worked like public key crypto. The weird ideas that didn't quite pan out. I'm a fan of weird ideas that don't quite work; reading Whittaker's history of E&M or stuff like the reletivistic aether theory in Sommerfeld's book.
Mostly interested as I had my own weird idea that (mostly) didn't pan out based on the Gutzwiller trace formula and symbolic dynamics of phase space.
A. Hey edited „Feynman Lectures on Computation” for publication and later collected some assorted papers of guest lecturers Feynman would invite in „Feynman and computation – exploring the limits of computers”. This „It from bit” paper by Wheeler (Feynman’s advisor) is the 19th there.
I spent half an hour composing meaningful description of insignificance of the work (without judging if it is indeed a result, attacked "uniqueness" is more of a technicality than anything much of a big deal) only to find out author also published stabs at some other Clay problems: http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.4935 (PNP), http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.2361 (RH)… at which point I have nothing more to say.
A very nifty (if somewhat detailed) complexity analysis of the Algorithm X appeared in blogosphere's festschrift for Knuth's 70, http://11011110.livejournal.com/128249.html
I've used P159 in my absolutely first assignment in the intro programming class. I was to make a N-queens solver. The assignment obviously asked for a 8-line backtracking program. But I was naïve. I went to the library and turned it inside out. My solution was ca. 500 lines, and also implemented a way to find the number of solutions without computing them (this was from IIRC a paper by Rivin), and had a randomized mode which would find just a single solution but for fast for very large N (this I found in Norvig's AIMA in a footnote referencing a paper by J.M., I don't remember the page or the full name)). Good times.
I tried (unsuccessfully) to make his design a year ago and it was more like $300 though, and that assuming you have the RF equipment.
Guy works at NASA I think. The claim that his is the only fully open source autopilot is to my knowledge true. No docs or schematics though, but these could be adapted from other projects, http://mikrokopter.dehttp://diydrones.com
Fuchsia doesn't share as much of the story but does pick up where in Dante's Inferno the original Unix people tried to abandon the root user to redeem themselves almost 30 years ago. Combined with capability based model last seen deployed in the wild with OS/400 and Burroughs machines before that, it would be the first truly new OS in decades.