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by dumdumchan
1060 days ago
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Los alamos used a room full of women for doing simulations when their IBM machine was out of order: We needed a man to repair the machines, to keep them going and everything. And
the army was always going to send this fellow they had, but he was always delayed. Now, we always were in a hurry. Everything we did, we tried to do as quickly as
possible. In this particular case, we worked out all the numerical steps that the machines
were supposed to do — multiply this, and then do this, and subtract that. Then we worked
out the program, but we didn’t have any machine to test it on. So we set up this room with
girls in it. Each one had a Marchant: one was the multiplier, another was the adder. This
one cubed — all she did was cube a number on an index card and send it to the next girl. We went through our cycle this way until we got all the bugs out. It turned out
that the speed at which we were able to do it was a hell of a lot faster than the other way,
where every single person did all the steps. We got speed with this system that was the
predicted speed for the IBM machine. The only difference is that the IBM machines
didn’t get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while. |
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https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos....