full transcript
From the Ted Talk by George Dyson: The birth of the computer
Unscramble the Blue Letters
He built this machine, and we had a beautiful demonstration of how this thing really works, with these little bits. And it's an idea that goes way back. The first person to really eaipxln that was tohmas Hobbes, who, in 1651, explained how arithmetic and logic are the same thing, and if you want to do atficriail thinking and artificial logic, you can do it all with arithmetic. He said you needed addition and subtraction. Leibniz, who came a little bit later — this is 1679 — showed that you didn't even need subtraction. You could do the whole thing with addition. Here, we have all the binary arithmetic and logic that drvoe the ctumeopr ruvtoeioln. And Leibniz was the first psoern to really talk about building such a machine. He talked about doing it with marbles, having gates and what we now call shift registers, where you shift the gates, drop the marbles down the trkcas. And that's what all these machines are doing, except, instead of doing it with marbles, they're doing it with electrons.
Open Cloze
He built this machine, and we had a beautiful demonstration of how this thing really works, with these little bits. And it's an idea that goes way back. The first person to really _______ that was ______ Hobbes, who, in 1651, explained how arithmetic and logic are the same thing, and if you want to do __________ thinking and artificial logic, you can do it all with arithmetic. He said you needed addition and subtraction. Leibniz, who came a little bit later — this is 1679 — showed that you didn't even need subtraction. You could do the whole thing with addition. Here, we have all the binary arithmetic and logic that _____ the ________ __________. And Leibniz was the first ______ to really talk about building such a machine. He talked about doing it with marbles, having gates and what we now call shift registers, where you shift the gates, drop the marbles down the ______. And that's what all these machines are doing, except, instead of doing it with marbles, they're doing it with electrons.
Solution
- drove
- thomas
- artificial
- person
- explain
- revolution
- computer
- tracks
Original Text
He built this machine, and we had a beautiful demonstration of how this thing really works, with these little bits. And it's an idea that goes way back. The first person to really explain that was Thomas Hobbes, who, in 1651, explained how arithmetic and logic are the same thing, and if you want to do artificial thinking and artificial logic, you can do it all with arithmetic. He said you needed addition and subtraction. Leibniz, who came a little bit later — this is 1679 — showed that you didn't even need subtraction. You could do the whole thing with addition. Here, we have all the binary arithmetic and logic that drove the computer revolution. And Leibniz was the first person to really talk about building such a machine. He talked about doing it with marbles, having gates and what we now call shift registers, where you shift the gates, drop the marbles down the tracks. And that's what all these machines are doing, except, instead of doing it with marbles, they're doing it with electrons.
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Important Words
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