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 wkors, 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 tiniknhg and artificial logic, you can do it all with arithmetic. He said you neeedd 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 binray arithmetic and logic that drove the ctpuemor revolution. And Leibniz was the first peosrn to really talk about building such a machine. He tekald about doing it with marbles, having gates and what we now call shift registers, where you shift the gates, drop the marbles down the tarkcs. 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 _____, 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 ________ and artificial logic, you can do it all with arithmetic. He said you ______ 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 ______ arithmetic and logic that drove the ________ revolution. And Leibniz was the first ______ to really talk about building such a machine. He ______ 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

  1. computer
  2. works
  3. binary
  4. tracks
  5. person
  6. thinking
  7. talked
  8. needed

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.

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
von neumann 12
vacuum tubes 4
julian bigelow 3

Important Words

  1. addition
  2. arithmetic
  3. artificial
  4. beautiful
  5. binary
  6. bit
  7. bits
  8. building
  9. built
  10. call
  11. computer
  12. demonstration
  13. drop
  14. drove
  15. electrons
  16. explain
  17. explained
  18. gates
  19. hobbes
  20. idea
  21. leibniz
  22. logic
  23. machine
  24. machines
  25. marbles
  26. needed
  27. person
  28. registers
  29. revolution
  30. shift
  31. showed
  32. subtraction
  33. talk
  34. talked
  35. thinking
  36. thomas
  37. tracks
  38. works