Quotes about computer
page 10

“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.”

Leslie Lamport (1941) American computer scientist

Email of 28 May 1987 https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/distributed-system.txt
As quoted in [Teresa K. Attwood, Stephen R. Pettifer, David Thorne, Bioinformatics Challenges at the Interface of Biology and Computer Science: Mind the Gap, https://books.google.com/books?id=_i-8DAAAQBAJ&pg=PA266, 26 September 2016, John Wiley & Sons, 978-0-470-03548-1, 266–]

Failure

“The press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids. ... There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked.”

Ken Thompson (1943) American computer scientist, creator of the Unix operating system

"Reflections on Trusting Trust" http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/360000/358210/reflections.pdf, 1983 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 27 (8), August 1984, pp. 761-763.

Making love, Housing

“To each computable sequence there corresponds at least one description number, while to no description number does there correspond more than one computable sequence. The computable sequences and numbers are therefore enumerable.”

Alan Turing Computable Numbers

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)

“If an ɑ-machine prints two kinds of symbols, of which the first kind (called figures) consists entirely of 0 and 1 (the others being called symbols of the second kind), then the machine will be called a computing machine.”

Alan Turing Computable Numbers

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)

“We may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions q1, q2, ..., qK which will be called " m-configurations ."”

Alan Turing Computable Numbers

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)

“So, I think the best analogy for rocket engineers, if you want to create complicated software, you can't run as an integrated whole, or run on the computer it's intended to run on, but, first time you run it, it has to run with no bugs. That's the essence of it. So ... we missed the mark there.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Caltech Commencement Address http://commencement.caltech.edu/archive/speakers/2012_address - 2012 Quotes https://www.wewishes.com/elon-musk-quotes/, Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007), Foreword to Marc Kaufman's Mars Up Close: Inside the Curiosity Mission https://books.google.com/books/about/Mars_Up_Close.html?id=o6XaCwAAQBAJ&hl=en. National Geographic. ISBN 978-1-4262-1278-9.

Thinking, Time

“Ah, but my Computations, People say,
Reduced the Year to better reckoning?”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

Khayyám measured the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days;
see Quotes about Khayyám below
Source: The Rubaiyat (1120)
Context: Nay
'Twas only striking from the Calendar
Unborn To-morrow, and dead Yesterday.

People

“In 20 or 30 years, you’ll be able to hold in your hand as much computing knowledge as exists now in the whole city, or even the whole world.”

Douglas Engelbart (1925–2013) American engineer and inventor

Source: https://via.hypothes.is/https://foresight.org/Updates/Update29/Update29.2.php#annotations:PoEiopu_Eee_awvQEu10ag

World, Knowledge

“Payoff will come when we make better use of computers to bring communities of people together and to augment the very human skills that people bring to bear on difficult problems.”

Douglas Engelbart (1925–2013) American engineer and inventor

Source: https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/348/000/#annotations:AVM5A_shH9ZO4OKSlBtx

People, Making love, Communication, Problem

“If you think about things that happen, as being computations... a computation in the sense that it has definite rules... You follow them many steps and you get some result. ...If you look at all these different computations that can happen, whether... in the natural world... in our brains... in our mathematics, whatever else, the big question is how do these computations compare. ...Are there dumb ...and smart computations, or are they somehow all equivalent? ...[T]he thing that I ...was ...surprised to realize from ...experiments ...in the early 90s, and now we have tons more evidence for ...[is] this ...principle of computational equivalence, which basically says that when one of these computations ...doesn't seem like it's doing something obviously simple, then it has reached this ...equivalent layer of computational sophistication of everything. So what does that mean? ...You might say that ...I'm studying this tiny little program ...and my brain is surely much smarter ...I'm going to be able to systematically outrun [it] because I have a more sophisticated computation ...but ...the principle ...says ...that doesn't work. Our brains are doing computations that are exactly equivalent to the kinds of computations that are being done in all these other sorts of systems. ...It means that we can't systematically outrun these systems. These systems are computationally irreducible in the sense that there's no ...shortcut ...that jumps to the answer.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe (Sep 15, 2020)

World, Mathematics, Question, Nature

“[W]e live... in the pockets of reducibility. ...I should have realized [that] very many years ago, but didn't... [I]t could very well be that everything about the world is computationally irreducible and completely unpredictable, but... in our experience of the world there is at least some amount of prediction we can make. ...[T]hat's because we have ...chosen a slice of ...how to think about the universe, in which we can... sample a certain amount of computational reducibility, and that's... where we exist. ...It may not be the whole story about how the universe is, but it is that part of the universe that we care about and ...operate in. ...In science, that's been ...a very special case ...science has chosen to talk a lot about places where there is this computational reducibility... The motion of the planets can be ...predicted. The... weather is much harder to predict. ...[S]cience has tended to concentrate itself on places where its methods have allowed successful prediction.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe (Sep 15, 2020)

World, Making love, Thinking, Universe

“[S]cience has become used to... using the little... pockets of computational reducibility ([A]n inevitable consequence of computational irreducibility... There have to be these pockets ...scattered around.) to be able to find those cases where you can jump ahead.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe (Sep 15, 2020)

“Wanting to be a DJ and start playing with the computer and the controller is like trying to be a player and start playing with the Play Station.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Voler fare il DJ e iniziare a suonare con il computer e il controller, è come voler fare il calciatore e iniziare a giocare con la Play Station.
Source: prevale.net

“My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years’ time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop. And it probably will.”

William Gibson book Distrust That Particular Flavor

"My Obsession," Wired, issue 7.01. 1999.
Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012)

Imagination, Time

“I don’t know how anybody would like to do anything but CGI today. Because they sit there on the computer and they can make it look so real.”

Joe Alves (1936) Film designer

‘Jaws’ At 45: Joe Alves Explains Making The Most Famous Movie Monster https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2020/06/24/jaws-at-45-joe-alves-explains-making-the-most-famous-movie-monster/?sh=1dcc247752a3 (June 24, 2020)

Making love

“The computer constitutes the first human construction that aspired to amplify mental rather than physical human powers.”

Yiannis Laouris (1958) Cypriot neuroscientist

mLearn International Conference (2005)

“Bad ideas in computer science and anywhere are sticky. If the first idea was a bad idea, then because it works people will sort of repeat it.”

Joe Armstrong (1950–2019) British computer scientist

The How and Why of Fitting Things Together

People, Idea, Science

“Do you know computer science?”

Rudy Rucker book Mathematicians in Love

“I know it’s for lamers who can’t handle real math.”
Source: Mathematicians in Love (2006), Chapter 3, “Rocking with Washer Drop” (p. 137)

Science

“People can be fooled into thinking of mathematics as logical, formal, symbolic reasoning. But this is far from reality...computers are far better at formal computation and formal reasoning, but humans are far better mathematicians.”

William Thurston (1946–2012) mathematician

Foreword to Teichmüller Theory

People, Fools, Mathematics, Thinking

“Need to tell myself I don't care
Need to tell myself you're not there
Need some air, need some space
Need some air
The way I'm feeling I just don't care.
This is Starship Trooper living on a whole other planet
Reboot computer”

Example (musician) (1982) English rapper and singer

"Natural Disaster" (song), with Laidback Luke Disaster", Official video on YouTube)) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q28e-Z9TAdU("Natural (+ "Natural Disaster", a lyrics version on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9Bh297hFrg Studio albums, Playing in the Shadows (2011)

Way, Feeling

“We are no longer securing just computers - we are securing the society.”

Mikko Hyppönen (1969) Finnish computer security expert

Source: A talk at Slush 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9gnLKw8P0 November 2015

“If the computer had been a human, its eyebrows would have raised.”

Robert L. Forward book Dragon's Egg

Source: Dragon's Egg (1980), Chapter 6, “Contact” Section 3 (p. 202)

“Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection.”

David Wheeler (computer scientist) (1927–2004) British computer scientist

Attributed to David Wheeler by Butler Lampson in his Turing Lecture https://web.archive.org/web/20070221210039/http://research.microsoft.com/Lampson/Slides/TuringLecture.doc (17 February 1993) Lampson uses the phrase without attribution in Authentication in distributed systems: theory and practice https://doi.org/10.1145/138873.138874 (November 1992)

Problem, Science