Berlin Brown and Software Development

1928 - The Entscheidungsproblem decision problem was proposed by David Hilbert 1936 - Church publishes "An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory" , Church's Thesis [1]. It is a paper on untyped lambda calculus. American Journal of Mathematics, Volume 58, No. 2. (Apr., 1936) 1936 - Alan Turning publishes a paper on an abstract machine , On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem' Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2, 42 (1936-37) . He proposed the concept of the stored-program. 1937+ - John von Neumann gains knowledge from Alan Turing's papers but Turing was not directly related to the development of ENIAC. 1943 - 1946 - Creation of ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) 1944 - John von Neumann became involved with ENIAC 1949-1960 - Early stored computers were created, some of the based on von Neumann architecture. 1952 - The IBM 701 was announced. The 701 was a stored-program compute...

When you look back at the major milestones in computing history, we moved quickly. We went from abstract models of computing to stored-program computers in a decade or less. It was truly amazing. 1903 - Alonzo Church was born in Washington, D.C. (USA) 1928 - The Entscheidungsproblem decision problem was proposed by David Hilbert 1936 - Church publishes "An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory" , Church's Thesis [1]. It is a paper on untyped lambda calculus. American Journal of Mathematics, Volume 58, No. 2. (Apr., 1936) 1936 - Alan Turning publishes a paper on an abstract machine , On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem' Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2, 42 (1936-37) . He proposed the concept of the stored-program. 1936 - 1938 - Alan Turing studies under Alonzo Church 1937 - John von Neumann recommends Alan Turing for Fellowship at Princeton. 1938 - Alan Turing receives Ph.D from Princet...

"Unthinking Machines Artificial intelligence needs a reboot, say experts." There are some issues with a top-down approach to automatic artificial complex behavior. The problem with modeling the brain or the brain's neural network is that you are just looking at the end result of millions of years of evolution. We should understand how the human brain became relevant and came to be and then we will find that other animals also have brains and exhibit complex behaviors. Simple animals have smaller brains but we can look how those systems evolved over time. You could go that route, completely model and understand the brain but you will still end up with issues. You will have a broken, less than accurate copy of the brain but then you still are missing other components of the human body. The heart, the nervous system, the lungs, millions of years of evolution. Scientists look at the brain and say, "Hey, that is pretty cool, let's model that". I say, "Hey...

It has just been reported, Osama bin Laden is dead. Now, I can stop looking for him. "Justice has been done" -- Obama

Unit Testing advocates use language that you hear from religious advocates. "You can't write software without unit tests". "You must unit test your code". That sounds a lot like: "You will go to hell if you sin". "If you don't accept Jesus as your lord and savior, you will go to hell". Where does that leave us? You can write software without unit tests. A lot of software has and will be written without unit tests. No human will go to hell for not accepting Jesus as their lord savior. Same question, where does that leave us? I may have advocated the use of unit tests. I think the concept is beneficial. BUT there are a couple of issues. Developers not writing unit tests is a big one (I was thinking about creating a spreadsheet, software from github and sourceforge, projects that have unit tests and those that don't). Why don't developers write unit tests? Because they don't have to. That is the main reaso...