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Article

Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine

FEB 01, 1989
In his last years, Feynman helped build an innovative computer. He had great fun with computers. Half the fun was explaining things to anyone who would listen.
W. Daniel Hillis

One day in the spring of 1983, when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. (I was at the time a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab). His reaction was unequivocal: “That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.” For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to prove it wrong—or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company.

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More about the authors

W. Daniel Hillis, Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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This Content Appeared In
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Volume 42, Number 2

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