Researcher Resurrects the First Computer 149
aleph60 writes "A German researcher is about to resurrect the first fully electronic general-purpose stored-program computer, the Manchester Mark 1 (1948). The functional replica will run the source code of an original program from 1952 by Christopher Strachey, whose sole purpose was generating love letters; it is historically interesting as one of the first examples of a text-generating program. The installation will be shown at an art exhibition in Germany at the end of April." Here is researcher David Link's Manchester Mark I emulator home, which generates a new love poem on each page load. When the Mark I had been used to search for new Mersenne primes in 1949, a press account coined the phrase "electronic brain" to characterize it.
Re:Haha, perfect timing (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Random Numbers on the Manchester Mark 1? (Score:4, Insightful)
every software solution IS pseudorandom.
Of course, Newton should us that nothing is truly random, just too complex to understand well enough to predict.
For example, if you new all the variables going into a coin toss, you would know what the result would be.
Re:Random Numbers on the Manchester Mark 1? (Score:2, Insightful)