Professor Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program. Built in 1949, the EDSAC used a mercury delay line memory. He is also known as the author, with Wheeler and Gill, of a volume on "Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers" in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced.
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1967 Turing Award citationMaurice Wilkes
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I well remember when this realization first came on me with full force. The EDSAC was on the top floor of the building and the tape-punching and editing equipment one floor below. [...] It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that "hesitating at the angles of stairs" the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.
Maurice Wilkes
In 1936 the notion of a computable function was clarified by Turing, and he showed the existence of universal computers that, with an appropriate program, could compute anything computed by any other computer. [...] In some subconscious sense even the sales departments of computer manufacturers are aware of this, and they do not advertise magic instructions that cannot be simulated on competitors machines, but only that their machines are faster, cheaper, have more memory, or are easier to program.
John McCarthy
"It's not the position of this program, or me, or [wife/program producer] Kathy [Bay], or anybody associated with this program to try to educate anybody about anything. You take from this program what you want; if you think I'm a wacko left-wing communist nutcase - fine! Run with it...jerk! If you think it's a fun program, go with that. If you get something - a link - go with that.
Mike Malloy
On his controversial initiative "Opportunity NYC": "Now, you might say, 'why should we pay people for doing what they're supposed to do?' It's a fair question -- but think of it this way. Every other anti-poverty program that's been tried has failed to get the national poverty rate below 11 percent. ... Why shouldn't we experiment with a program built around the one strategy that has proven time and again to work wonders -- capitalism?"
Michael Bloomberg
Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem solving performance. However, the machines mankind has so far found it useful to construct rarely have beliefs about beliefs, although such beliefs will be needed by computer programs that reason about what knowledge they lack and where to get it. Mental qualities peculiar to human-like motivational structures , such as love and hate, will not be required for intelligent behavior, but we could probably program computers to exhibit them if we wanted to, because our common sense notions about them translate readily into certain program and data structures. Still other mental qualities, e.g. humor and appreciation of beauty, seem much harder to model.
John McCarthy
Wilkes, Maurice
Wilkinson, James H.
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