Edward Fredkin

Edward Fredkin (* 1934 ) is an early pioneer of digital physics (he recently used the term digital philosophy ). The main contributions to his work are in the field of reversible computing and cellular automaton . While Konrad Zuse's book Rechnender Raum (1969) emphasized the importance of reversible computation, the Fredkin Gate brought the decisive breakthrough in the field.

Edward Fredkin dropped out of the California Institute of Technology after a year and joined the US Air Force at 19 to become a fighter jet pilot. His computing career began in 1956 when the Air Force assigned him to work at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman in the early 1960s , where he wrote the PDP-1 assembler. In 1968 he continued his academic career as a professor at MIT . From 1971 to 1974 he was the head of Project MAC . He worked with Richard Feynman at the California Institute of Technology for a year and was Professor of Physics at Boston University for six years . He is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting professor at MIT.

Fredkin founded Information International Inc. and was the managing director of various companies, including Information International, Three Rivers Computer Corporation, New England Television Corporation.

Fredkin deals with both hardware and software. He is the inventor of the Tries , a data structure for searching for strings . Further inventions of his are the Fredkin Gate and the Billiard Ball Model for reversible computing. He also did research in the field of computer vision, chess and other sub-areas of artificial intelligence . In addition, he dealt with theoretical questions in physics and computer models of physics. In doing so, he developed “Salt”, a calculation model based on the fundamental conservation laws of physics.

Fredkin was awarded the Dickson Prize in Science in 1983/84 .

literature

• Robert Wright: Three Scientists and Their Gods. Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information . Times Books, New York NY 1988, ISBN 0-8129-1328-0 .

Web links

• Digital philosophy