Can anyone recommend readings on von Neumann that highlight his non-mathematical achievements? Obviously he was primarily a physicist and mathematician, but for a non-mathematician, the long list of academic publications is hard to interpret and appreciate. For example, more in the vein of these:
- Reportedly, von Neumann possessed an eidetic memory, and so was able to recall complete novels and pages of the phone directory on command. This enabled him to accumulate an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what ever he read, such as the history of the Peloponnesian Wars, the Trial Joan of Arc and Byzantine history (Leonard, 2010). A Princeton professor of the latter topic once stated that by the time he was in his thirties, Johnny had greater expertise in Byzantine history than he did (Blair, 1957).
- ...conversing in Ancient Greek at age six...
- On his deathbed, he reportedly entertained his brother by reciting the first few lines of each page from Goethe’s Faust, word-for-word, by heart (Blair, 1957).
> Reportedly, von Neumann possessed an eidetic memory, and so was able to recall complete novels and pages of the phone directory on command. This enabled him to accumulate an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what ever he read
If he was able to recall ~entire pages of the phone directory on command, I wonder if he could also recall (near) verbatim text of all the novels he had ever read, to what degree he could do this, or to what degree he could at least comprehensively recall key points, facts, timelines.
I would think he would have spent some time speculating on how the brain stores memories, I wonder if any of his theories were ever captured in some form.
Supposedly, yes-- during his final stay in the hospital, his brother read to him from a book they'd enjoyed during their childhood, Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.
When his brother had to turn the page, John would continue the narration from memory while his brother found his place on the subsequent page.
Given that he could be occasionally absent minded, I suspect that it had to be something that piqued his interest, but his sense of what was interesting was extremely broad.
He did in fact speculate on the workings of the brain in The Computer and the Brain, which is based on a lecture series he had planned out but did not deliver.
It was more in the context of automata theory, but as someone with an interest in AI, automata, and neuroscience, it was frankly rather dank[0].
A lot of the pioneering work was, and is enjoyable in part because it's original and speculative, so you don't have to master the literature to make sense of it, you can just pick a paper and go. I'd recommend reading Pitts and McCullogh, plus also Lettvin, but others might have some equally lit[1] recommendations.
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0. In the contemporary sense, c.f. "cool", "dope", or "excellent"; not dank like a root cellar.
My word choice is more driven by exposure to the dataset that I'm working with.
There's been some recent successes with autoencoders trained on virtual sensory input (i.e., video games) with surprising results, e.g., neural networks that can simulate the dynamics of these environments with surprising fidelity.
Of course, learning to play video games at a high level is trivially easy, as everyone in the field now knows.
The next challenge is, naturally, to make money doing this.
But how?
After the traditional thirty seconds of research before undertaking a major project, I determined that the only way to make money from video games is to become a popular streamer.
So now I am training an agent to generate video of it playing and reacting to an imaginary game and equally fictitious Twitch viewers, with a dataset drawn from the top Fortnite streamers.
The reward function is comprised of a blend of subscribers, donations, and (logarithmically scaled) misogyny in the chat.
Thus far, I've only managed to create some sort of window into hell, where the "game" consists of unceasing violence, murder after murder after murder as towers of mismatched material swell and fall in ever transforming locations on the isle while the chat endlessly subscribes, spams, and emotes in cackling glee and the superimposed webcam video features a... thing with too many eyes and hands screaming incoherently.
At first I thought it was a problem with my dataset, so I started watching some of the streams myself.
This has not yielded insight into the whole "nightmare vision" output of my model, but it has expanded my vocabulary on the twin subjects of combustibles and comestibles, which I feel is a reasonable trade-off for the sanity battering associated with this whole endeavour.
>He died at age 53 on February 8, 1957, at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., under military security lest he reveal military secrets while heavily medicated.
John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (Aspray) is a great historical account and details many of his other contributions (e.g. game theory, automata, but especially meteorology).
I own a biography of von Neumann called "John von Neumann", by Norman Macrae. It is serviceable and gives you a feeling for von Neumann's life, but it is not particularly deep. It does contain examples of the sort of anecdotes you mentioned, however.
Not really. From the wikipedia page on eidetic memory [1]:
```
Although the terms eidetic memory and photographic memory are popularly used interchangeably,[1] they are also distinguished, with eidetic memory referring to the ability to view memories like photographs for a few minutes,[3] and photographic memory referring to the ability to recall pages of text or numbers, or similar, in great detail.[4][5] When the concepts are distinguished, eidetic memory is reported to occur in a small number of children and as something generally not found in adults,[2][6] while true photographic memory has never been demonstrated to exist.
```
I've always wondered about that, because a few savants like Kim Peek are/were able to recall everything they read.
"He could speed through a book in about an hour and remember almost everything he had read, memorizing vast amounts of information in subjects ranging from history and literature, geography and numbers to sports, music and dates. Peek read by scanning the left page with his left eye, then the right page with his right eye. According to an article in The Times newspaper, he could accurately recall the contents of at least 12,000 books."
I think the test case (which nobody has passed) for true photographic memory is: you are given an image of a bunch of random dots with no apparent structure, then you are given a second such image, and you have to mentally combine them and say what image they form. Because if you superimpose the two images of random dots — say using transparent slides, one on top of the other —- they actually form a photograph of Marilyn Monroe or something, but each image in isolation looks totally random.
If someone had photographic memory then they could do this superimposition in their memory, but it doesn’t seem like anybody can.
I don't know if I agree that it's a good test. If I had two images in front of me of random dots, I cannot superimpose them and see a picture of Marilyn Monroe, no matter how long I can look at them. (ah, actually I could go cross-eyed to make them overlap in my field of vision, but I can't do it mentally).
I could imagine a "spot the difference" type of test would be a good one though. The fields of random dots are identical save for one dot, and you have say where it is. Something like that.
Right, the point of the test is that you can't do it unless you can (relatively quickly) memorize what looks like a random picture of noise. With true photographic memory, that should be possible.
I still don't agree - I'm saying that even if I don't have to remember the field of random dots, even if it's right in front of me, I still can't see an image of Marilyn Monroe. Being able to remember it wouldn't help. If being able to remember it wouldn't help me pass the test, then the test will have a high false-negative rate, and is not a good test of memory.
- Reportedly, von Neumann possessed an eidetic memory, and so was able to recall complete novels and pages of the phone directory on command. This enabled him to accumulate an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what ever he read, such as the history of the Peloponnesian Wars, the Trial Joan of Arc and Byzantine history (Leonard, 2010). A Princeton professor of the latter topic once stated that by the time he was in his thirties, Johnny had greater expertise in Byzantine history than he did (Blair, 1957).
- ...conversing in Ancient Greek at age six...
- On his deathbed, he reportedly entertained his brother by reciting the first few lines of each page from Goethe’s Faust, word-for-word, by heart (Blair, 1957).