alt Hacker NewsZuse is probably the most under-appreciated thinker of the 20th century. Everybody's heard of Claude Shannon, von Neumann, Feynman, and all the rest of 'em, but Zuse's enormous contributions have received rather little attention.
To summarize a couple of the highlights:
In 1936 Germany, Konrad Zuse began developing the Z1, a mechanical calculating machine programmed via perforated 35mm film. By 1937, he had broadened its architecture toward universal digital computation in the vein of Alan Turing. Although completed in 1938, the machine struggled with mechanical inaccuracies -- the same challenge which plagued Charles Babbage's much earlier work on the Difference Engine. Zuse overcame these mechanical hurdles in 1941 with the Z3, an operational digital computer capable of universal computation.
In fact, the Z3 was the world's first working machine physically capable of universal computation. The first real computer.
Zuse was also one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. In a book he published titled "Calculating Space," He was the first to surmise that our universe is computable by a deterministic computer program. Every "simulation hypothesis" and "mathematical universe" theory is downstream of Zuse. (One could argue that the Pythagoreans and neo-Pythagoreans, who held that the world was at root mathematical, were truly first, but Zuse made important and original contributions nevertheless.) It's important to note that, to this day, there are no physical observations which contradict Zuse's notion, as he wrote it, of a computable universe.
I would think that the German state or EU should provide funding for his museum. If that's not the case, it's a shame.
Replies
The argument that the Z3 is universal "was an impressive party trick, but diverged entirely from the way the machine was designed, how it was actually used, or indeed from anything that would have made sense in the 1940s."
Source: ENIAC in Action p255.
I think Zuse is underrated because he worked pretty much alone. The other names and particularly Von Nuemann were prolific collaborators apart from being very good at what they do. There’s probably a takeaway from how this turned out.
>I would think that the German state or EU should provide funding for his museum. If that's not the case, it's a shame.
There is another Museum of his, which is still funded.
Konrad Zuse also seems to have been a pioneer in the concept of self-replication and self assembly.
Check out this cool crank-powered self-assembling tower thing that he made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odwgpKRnWM8&t=1s
And his work on self replication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxv4vDMOFCo
I know very little about Zuse or his work and I lament that this museum is closing down as I am moving to Europe next year and had intended to use the opportunity to research his work.
Neil Gershenfeld has a quip that "computer science is the worst thing to happen to both computers and science because it prematurely froze the model of computation around 1950s designs' and I think there's some truth to this. The resource limitations that Zuse experienced in Germany during the depression and war that forced him down a design path of mechanical design over electromechanical and exposed him to the more fundamental idea that computation is ultimately a physical process -- 'there's no such thing as software just different states of hardware'. I have a feeling that the next big technological revolution will be based around self-replicating machines that more fully unify computation with matter.
There are also no physical observations that contradict the notion of God. The problem is that no such observations are even possible, or at least no test they could be put to that could disprove the theory.
> there are no physical observations which contradict Zuse's notion, as he wrote it, of a computable universe.
There is no model capable of simulating the universe either.
I also wonder what such an observation would have to look like. Observations per se are unique and recorded and therefore can be reconstructed via trivial computation. Which brings us to the laws of physics. You may believe that they are utterly wrong and the universe is deterministic after all, but then the burden of proof is upon you.
You missed some important points that explain why he's not celebrated.
His efforts received enormous amounts of funding from the Nazis.
Much of his specialized 'computers' were explicitly for the war effort, including planes.
He was a big fan of utilizing computing for racial and genealogy research. The Nazis had plans drawn out to murder orders of magnitude more people based on this sort of research had they won (Generalplan Ost).
It was not like he was forced at gunpoint to participate, he was all in for the funding. Much like Von Braun, but did not have the luck to be paperclipped.
> to surmise that our universe is computable by a deterministic computer program
Please an expert chime in to complement, but I believe simulation in quantum mechanics is a quite interesting and not so simple topic.
I believe the more correct thing to say is that quantum mechanics is approximable than simply computable. Don't forget, QM and current physical theories use real numbers, which are not digitally representable; although it seems also the case that information is locally bounded. The finite distribution of states and probabilistic dynamics is I believe is fundamentally what makes information bounded, (which forbids for example naive hypercomputation and I think several paradoxes that might arise from unbounded local information) but don't forget in general the dynamics is still based on continuous quantities as far as we know, not discrete quantities like in a computer. QM is about discrete states within a continuum set interacting with continuum dynamics, I think is accurate to say. Quantum field theory probably complicates things more but similar conclusions might be valid. This continuum dynamics can't be computed exactly, at most you could achieve a pretty good approximation; you'd also need to provision probabilities, either from pseudorandomness (which technically would invalidate the probabilistic model, although in practice this invalidation is not feasibly distinguishable by an observer of current human-scale computing power) or gathering environmental noise.
It's really interesting to me how nature is kind of surprising and defiant of simple hypothesis we come up with. But I think each of those characteristics plays a role, is an important part of existence somehow, and we should keep trying to understand why each aspect of nature is the particular way it is for their numerous insights into our condition and existence.