Meet the Train Makers
Infrastructurist is doing a series on the manufacturers of high-speed trains:
The transportation industry seems to be undergoing a “retrofication” these days. We’re going back to the original form of mass transit: the railroad.
The computer business is the same way. Business computing through the 70s and 80s consisted mostly of UNIX mainframe/terminal architecture. In the 90s the world went the way of the personal computer, providing fast computing for everyone right at their desks. It feels like we’re swinging the other way again, with terminal services and shared resources making a comeback, along with all of the “cloud computing” possibilities around today.
This is amazing:
Initially, the equations generated by the program failed to explain the data, but some failures were slightly less wrong than others. Using a genetic algorithm, the program modified the most promising failures, tested them again, chose the best, and repeated the process until a set of equations evolved to describe the systems. Turns out, some of these equations were very familiar: the law of conservation of momentum, and Newton’s second law of motion.
