He's a legend. For further reading on Claude Shannon check out the following books.<p>Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone (<a href="http://goo.gl/VrBMUW" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/VrBMUW</a>)<p>The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick (<a href="http://goo.gl/Q5tzCW" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/Q5tzCW</a>)
very cool.<p>check this out for a modern example:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExW_rxKdNJE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExW_rxKdNJE</a><p>For those interested -- people are still interested in building maze solving robots, still called "micromouse". Here is one amazin micromouse that can traverse a maze and remember the solution very, very quickly. These days, its as much a mechanical problem (i.e. building a mouse that is robust, and has accurate sensors) as it is algorithmic.
I wish he were alive and working today. The fact that Alzheimer's prevented him from seeing the increasingly amazing results of his life's work is one of history's small but powerful tragedies.
Fantastic video. Even just the sound of Theseus's operation is fun to hear.<p><i>"This is a bank of relays: telephone relays."</i><p>On a tangential note: just the other day I was having a conversation with a friend who felt that "phone" was an inaccurate and perhaps inappropriately diminutive term for the pocket computers that so many people carry now. I argued contrarily from a language-evolution standpoint, but if I were to find myself in a similar discussion again I think I might instead point toward what a tremendous role telephone systems and the people like Shannon who built them played in the development of what we now call computers. Smartphones are descendants of telephones but they're equally descendants of telephone <i>systems</i>.
For people without flashplayer:<p><pre><code> rtmpdump -r 'rtmp://cp262207.edgefcs.net/ondemand/techchannel/10385/videos/OW10002.Claude_Shannon-FL8_550x310_700K' -o Claude_Shannon_Demonstrates_Machine_Learning.flv</code></pre>
I remember reading about this and his work at Bell in The Idea Factory <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factory" rel="nofollow">http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factory</a> It's awesome and strange in the same time.<p>He was basically fooling around "instead of work", creating such amazing things, while all the more people fooling around "instead of work" I see these days are at max creating high scores for Candy Crush...<p>Lot to learn. :)
"We must beware of invalid 'implications' in the discussion of nervous systems, brains and machinery. Are there men who would deny the meaning of ethics, of aesthetics, of religion, on the strength of a mechanical tortoise? Absurdly enough, there are." - Stafford Beer, 'Cybernetics and Management' 1959.
I'm the only one that reading Theseus thought about this: <a href="http://continuum.wikia.com/wiki/Julian_Randol" rel="nofollow">http://continuum.wikia.com/wiki/Julian_Randol</a> ?