Original version ~ Of This story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
In the movie OppenheimerEarly in his career, Niels Bohr challenged physicists:
Bohr: Algebra is like sheet music. The question is not, “Can you read sheet music?” but, “Can you hear it?” Can you hear sheet music, Robert?
Oppenheimer: Absolutely.
I can’t hear the sound of algebra, but I feel the machine.
I felt the machine before I ever touched a computer. In the 1970s, I waited for my first machine, a Radio Shack TRS-80, to arrive, and imagined how it would work. I wrote a few simple programs on paper, and I could feel the machine I didn’t have yet doing each step. It was almost frustrating to finally type in a program and just see the output without experiencing the process inside.
Even today, I can’t see or hear the machine, but it sings to me. I feel it humming, updating variables, looping, branching, searching, and continuing until it reaches its destination and provides an answer. To me, a program is not static code, but a living embodiment of a living organism that follows my instructions to a (hopefully) successful conclusion. I know that computers don’t physically work this way, but that doesn’t stop my metaphorical machine.
When you start thinking about computation, you see it everywhere. Think about sending a letter through the postal service. You put the letter in an envelope with an address and a stamp, and you put it in a mailbox, and somehow it ends up in the recipient’s mailbox. This is computation. It’s a series of operations that the letter has to go through from one place to another until it reaches its final destination. This routing process is not much different from email or other data that is sent over the Internet. It may seem strange to see the world this way, but as Friedrich Nietzsche said, “A dancer who cannot hear music is considered crazy.”
This innate sense of working machines can provide a computational perspective on almost any phenomenon, even seemingly incomprehensible phenomena like the concept of randomness. Even something as seemingly random as a coin flip can be explained entirely by a complex computational process that produces an unpredictable outcome, heads or tails. That outcome depends on a multitude of variables: the force, angle, and height of the throw; the weight, diameter, thickness, and mass distribution of the coin; air resistance; gravity; the hardness of the landing surface. The same goes for shuffling a deck of cards, rolling dice, spinning a roulette wheel, or generating “random” numbers on a computer. These involve executing some deliberately complex function. None of these processes are truly random.
This idea goes back centuries. In 1814, his Philosophical essay on probabilityPierre-Simon Laplace was the first to describe an intelligence capable of predicting these outcomes, now known as Laplace’s Demon.
