full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Saul Griffith: Everyday inventions

Unscramble the Blue Letters

— and if you wtcah this thing long enough you get dizzy, but what you're actually seeing is copies of that orianigl string emerging from the parts bin that you have here. So we've got autonomous replication of bit strings. So, why would you want to replicate bit strings? Well, it turns out biology has this other very instteinerg meme, that you can take a leainr string, which is a convenient thing to copy, and you can fold that into an arbitrarily complex 3D structure. So I was trying to, you know, take the engineer's version: Can we build a manhiaccel system in inorganic materials that will do the same thing?

Open Cloze

— and if you _____ this thing long enough you get dizzy, but what you're actually seeing is copies of that ________ string emerging from the parts bin that you have here. So we've got autonomous replication of bit strings. So, why would you want to replicate bit strings? Well, it turns out biology has this other very ___________ meme, that you can take a ______ string, which is a convenient thing to copy, and you can fold that into an arbitrarily complex 3D structure. So I was trying to, you know, take the engineer's version: Can we build a __________ system in inorganic materials that will do the same thing?

Solution

  1. original
  2. interesting
  3. mechanical
  4. watch
  5. linear

Original Text

— and if you watch this thing long enough you get dizzy, but what you're actually seeing is copies of that original string emerging from the parts bin that you have here. So we've got autonomous replication of bit strings. So, why would you want to replicate bit strings? Well, it turns out biology has this other very interesting meme, that you can take a linear string, which is a convenient thing to copy, and you can fold that into an arbitrarily complex 3D structure. So I was trying to, you know, take the engineer's version: Can we build a mechanical system in inorganic materials that will do the same thing?

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
extremely simple 3
pretty interesting 3
light switches 2
neil gershenfeld 2
complex structure 2
state machines 2
air hockey 2
simple rules 2
boundary condition 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
extremely simple rules 2

Important Words

  1. arbitrarily
  2. autonomous
  3. bin
  4. biology
  5. bit
  6. build
  7. complex
  8. convenient
  9. copies
  10. copy
  11. dizzy
  12. emerging
  13. fold
  14. inorganic
  15. interesting
  16. linear
  17. long
  18. materials
  19. mechanical
  20. meme
  21. original
  22. parts
  23. replicate
  24. replication
  25. string
  26. strings
  27. structure
  28. system
  29. turns
  30. watch