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Norman Margolus
Norman H. Margolus (born 1955) is a Canadian-American physicist and computer scientist, known for his work on cellular automata and reversible computing.. He is a research affiliate with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Education and career Margolus received his Ph.D. in physics in 1987 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the supervision of Edward Fredkin. He founded and was chief scientist for Permabit, an information storage device company. Research contributions Margolus was one of the organizers of a seminal research meeting on the connections between physics and computation theory, held on Mosquito Island in 1982. He is known for inventing the block cellular automaton and the Margolus neighborhood for block cellular automata, which he used to develop cellular automaton simulations of billiard-ball computers.. Reprinted in . In the same work, Margolus also showed that the bil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Block Cellular Automaton
A block cellular automaton or partitioning cellular automaton is a special kind of cellular automaton in which the lattice of cells is divided into non-overlapping blocks (with different partitions at different time steps) and the transition rule is applied to a whole block at a time rather than a single cell. Block cellular automata are useful for simulations of physical quantities, because it is straightforward to choose transition rules that obey physical constraints such as reversibility and conservation laws. Definition A block cellular automaton consists of the following components: *A regular lattice of cells *A finite set of the states that each cell may be in *A partition of the cells into a uniform tessellation in which each tile of the partition has the same size and shape *A rule for shifting the partition after each time step *A transition rule, a function that takes as input an assignment of states for the cells in a single tile and produces as output another assign ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mosquito Island
Mosquito Island (sometimes spelled Moskito Island) is an island off the coast of Virgin Gorda and has long been a favourite for scuba divers and sailors. For many years the island was the location of a sail-in dive resort named Drake's Anchorage. Sir Richard Branson purchased the island in 2007 for £10 million. Branson announced in 2011 that he planned to relocate ring-tailed lemurs from some zoos in Canada, Sweden, and South Africa to the island. Later relocations of red ruffed lemurs and possibly sifakas might follow. The announced plans were met with some criticism. The island is located on the west side of Gorda Sound adjacent to Virgin Gorda and near Necker Island, which is also owned by Branson. Barack Obama visited the island in February 2017, and learned how to kiteboard there, shortly after his retirement as President of the United States. Name On old nautical charts of the British Virgin Islands, the island's name is often spelled "Moskito" (possibly as an old ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Programmable Matter
Programmable matter is matter which has the ability to change its physical properties (shape, density, moduli, conductivity, optical properties, etc.) in a programmable fashion, based upon user input or autonomous sensing. Programmable matter is thus linked to the concept of a material which inherently has the ability to perform information processing. History Programmable matter is a term originally coined in 1991 by Toffoli and Margolus to refer to an ensemble of fine-grained computing elements arranged in space. Their paper describes a computing substrate that is composed of fine-grained compute nodes distributed throughout space which communicate using only nearest neighbor interactions. In this context, programmable matter refers to compute models similar to cellular automata and lattice gas automata. The CAM-8 architecture is an example hardware realization of this model. This function is also known as "digital referenced areas" (DRA) in some forms of self-replicati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantum Computer
Quantum computing is a type of computation whose operations can harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement. Devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers. Though current quantum computers may be too small to outperform usual (classical) computers for practical applications, larger realizations are believed to be capable of solving certain computational problems, such as integer factorization (which underlies RSA encryption), substantially faster than classical computers. The study of quantum computing is a subfield of quantum information science. There are several models of quantum computation with the most widely used being quantum circuits. Other models include the quantum Turing machine, quantum annealing, and adiabatic quantum computation. Most models are based on the quantum bit, or "qubit", which is somewhat analogous to the bit in classical computation. A qubit can be in a 1 or 0 quantum ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantum Gate
In quantum computing and specifically the quantum circuit model of computation, a quantum logic gate (or simply quantum gate) is a basic quantum circuit operating on a small number of qubits. They are the building blocks of quantum circuits, like classical logic gates are for conventional digital circuits. Unlike many classical logic gates, quantum logic gates are reversible. It is possible to perform classical computing using only reversible gates. For example, the reversible Toffoli gate can implement all Boolean functions, often at the cost of having to use ancilla bits. The Toffoli gate has a direct quantum equivalent, showing that quantum circuits can perform all operations performed by classical circuits. Quantum gates are unitary operators, and are described as unitary matrices relative to some basis. Usually we use the ''computational basis'', which unless we compare it with something, just means that for a ''d''-level quantum system (such as a qubit, a quantum register ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital media, digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as ''The Daily (podcast), The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones (publisher), George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won List of Pulitzer Prizes awarded to The New York Times, 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national "newspaper of record". For print it is ranked List of newspapers by circulation, 18th in the world by circulation and List of newspapers in the United States, 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is Public company, publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 189 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Integrated Circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny MOSFETs (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors) integrate into a small chip. This results in circuits that are orders of magnitude smaller, faster, and less expensive than those constructed of discrete electronic components. The IC's mass production capability, reliability, and building-block approach to integrated circuit design has ensured the rapid adoption of standardized ICs in place of designs using discrete transistors. ICs are now used in virtually all electronic equipment and have revolutionized the world of electronics. Computers, mobile phones and other home appliances are now inextricable parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the small size and low cost of ICs such as modern computer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tom Knight (scientist)
Tom Knight is an American synthetic biologist and computer engineer, who was formerly a senior research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a part of the MIT School of Engineering. He now works at the synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks, which he cofounded in 2008. Work in electrical engineering and computer science Tom Knight arrived at MIT when he was fourteen. Even though he only started his undergraduate studies at the regular age of 18, he took classes in computer programming and organic chemistry during high school because he lived close to the university. He built early hardware such as ARPANET interfaces for host #6 on the network, some of the first bitmapped displays, the ITS time sharing system, Lisp machines (he was also instrumental in releasing a version of the operating system for the Lisp machine under a BSD license), the Connection Machine, and parallel symbolic processing computer systems. In 1967 Knight ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tommaso Toffoli
Tommaso Toffoli () is an Italian-American professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University where he joined the faculty in 1995. He has worked on cellular automata and the theory of artificial life (with Edward Fredkin and others), and is known for the invention of the Toffoli gate. Early life and career He was born in June, 1943 in Montereale Valcellina, in northeastern Italy, to Francesco and Valentina (Saveri) Toffoli and was raised in Rome. He received his laurea in physics (equivalent to a Master's degree) from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1967. Toffoli moved to the United States in 1969. In 1976 he received a Ph.D. in computer and communication science from the University of Michigan, then in 1978 he joined the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a principal research scientist, where he remained until 1995, when he joined the faculty of Boston University. Books * ''Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling'', ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scientific American
''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. ''Scientific American'' is owned by Springer Nature, which in turn is a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. History ''Scientific American'' was founded by inventor and publisher Rufus Porter (painter), Rufus Porter in 1845 as a four-page weekly newspaper. The first issue of the large format newspaper was released August 28, 1845. Throughout its early years, much emphasis was placed on reports of what was going on at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Patent Office. It also reported on a broad range of inventions including perpetual motion machines, an 1860 device for buoying vessels by Abraham Lincoln, and the universal joint which now can be found ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Turing Completeness
In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules (such as a computer's instruction set, a programming language, or a cellular automaton) is said to be Turing-complete or computationally universal if it can be used to simulate any Turing machine (devised by English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing). This means that this system is able to recognize or decide other data-manipulation rule sets. Turing completeness is used as a way to express the power of such a data-manipulation rule set. Virtually all programming languages today are Turing-complete. A related concept is that of Turing equivalence two computers P and Q are called equivalent if P can simulate Q and Q can simulate P. The Church–Turing thesis conjectures that any function whose values can be computed by an algorithm can be computed by a Turing machine, and therefore that if any real-world computer can simulate a Turing machine, it is Turing equivalent to a Turing machine. A universal Turin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Fredkin
Edward Fredkin (born October 2, 1934) is a distinguished career professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and an early pioneer of digital physics. Fredkin's primary contributions include work on reversible computing and cellular automata. While Konrad Zuse's book, ''Calculating Space'' (1969), mentioned the importance of reversible computation, the Fredkin gate represented the essential breakthrough. In recent work, he uses the term ''digital philosophy'' (DP). During his career, Fredkin has been a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at Caltech, and Research Professor of Physics at Boston University. Early life and education At age 19, Fredkin left California Institute of Technology (Caltech) after a year to join the United States Air Force (USAF) to become a fighter pilot. Fredkin’s computer career started in 1956 when the air force assigned him to MIT Lincoln Laboratory where we worked on the SA ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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