Microsoft, which to me is that big collection of buildings across the lake where I yell when Vista bogs down my laptop, has announced a new Research Lab to be located in Cambridge, MA. It will be run by mathematical physicist turned comptuer scientist Jennifer Tour Chayes who was the manager for Mathematics, Theoretical Computer Science and Cryptography at Microsoft Research in Redmond.
For some strange reason I get the feeling that Microsoft and Google are playing a large game of Risk with the pieces being replaced by offices, and the countries being replaced by top teir university towns.
O brave new quantum world!
So why is it that we only have HP labs in Bristol.
Oh.
Damn.
Micro$oft runs up through Alaska to Kamchatka over the Bucky Fuller Memorial Global PowerNet Bridge. “If we can hold all of Asia for just one turn,” yells an arm-waving red-faced Ballmer, “I’ll start with 7 extra armies next time, and sweep down into Australia for the scramjets and nude beaches and Balmaine Bugs and Carpetbaggers (steak cut open and stuffed with oysters and sewed shut and grilled) and they have like 2 PCs per home when the USA only had 1 PC per home, and [suddenly resembling Galadriel] I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired this… [Starts to grow dark] In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Balrog-Ballmer! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me (and Windows) and despair!”
Almost exactly 40 years ago in 1968 I was programming up a storm at Caltech in a language called CITRAN (derived from JOSS) running on dumb terminals connected to an IBM 7090/7094 which did ALL the computing for all departments of Caltech plus NASA JPL!
John Horton Conway was visiting Caltech for a while, and so discussed Game Of Life and polytope theory and knot theory. My programming style (I’d started a couple of years earlier with FORTRAN IV in an IBM 1130 at Stuyvesant High School) was influenced by classes I took on Theory of Algorithms by the immortal John “Jack” Todd, Pseudorandom Numbers by Joel Franklin, Coding Theory by Solomon Golomb, Assembly Language by Stephen H. Caine (who had gone from college drop-out to software start-up CEO to Professor with no degree intervening), Advanced Probability by Gary Lorden, Group/Ring/Module/Galois Theory by Richard Dean, dialogues (no class as such) with Donald Knuth, Mathematical Linguistics by Fred and Bozena Thompson, Infinitary Logic, discussion on Cellular Automata with Stanislaw Ulam, many discussions with Richard Feynman on Quantum Computing (I introduced him to negative probabilities) and what’s now called Nanotechnology, and many seminars on interactive Computational Biology by Derek Fender.
Then I programmed the game RISK onto the computer, arguably the first role-playing game modeled at a sufficiently sophisticated level in software…
Ah, those were the days. Much better than the tie-goes-to-defense odds that Iraqi insurgents have defending with a dry-drunk coke-snorting chip-on-shoulder male cheerleader draftdodger psyhopath with delusions of grandewur, incapable of introspection or admitting he’s ever wrong, fratboy expending vast armies and throwing bloody dice to infinity and beyond.
Oh, I’m SO psyched that I’m about to vote in the California Primary Election this morning!