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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
to unroll the process that's happening? No, I had no clue. I remember, I think, in
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
the summer after my senior year – or maybe it was the summer after my junior year – well,
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
at some point, I think, when I was 18, I went on a trip to the Math Olympiad in Eastern
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Europe, and there was like – I was part of the Dutch team, and there were other nerdy
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
kids that sort of had different experiences, and one of them told me about this amazing
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thing called a computer. And I had never heard that word. My own explorations in electronics
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
were sort of about very simple digital circuits, and I had sort of – I had the idea that
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I somewhat understood how a digital calculator worked. And so there is maybe some echoes
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of computers there, but I never made that connection. I didn't know that when my parents
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
were paying for magazine subscriptions using punched cards, that there was something called
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
a computer that was involved that read those cards and transferred the money between accounts.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I was also not really interested in those things. It was only when I went to university
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
to study math that I found out that they had a computer, and students were allowed to use
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
it.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
And there were some – you're supposed to talk to that computer by programming it.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
What did that feel like, finding –
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Yeah, that was the only thing you could do with it. The computer wasn't really connected
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
to the real world. The only thing you could do was sort of – you typed your program
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
on a bunch of punched cards. You gave the punched cards to the operator, and an hour
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
later the operator gave you back your printout. And so all you could do was write a program
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
that did something very abstract. And I don't even remember what my first forays into programming
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
were, but they were sort of doing simple math exercises and just to learn how a programming
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language worked.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Did you sense, okay, first year of college, you see this computer, you're able to have
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
a program and it generates some output. Did you start seeing the possibility of this,
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
or was it a continuation of the tinkering with circuits? Did you start to imagine that
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
one, the personal computer, but did you see it as something that is a tool, like a word
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
processing tool, maybe for gaming or something? Or did you start to imagine that it could
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be going to the world of robotics, like the Frankenstein picture that you could create
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
an artificial being? There's like another entity in front of you. You did not see the
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
computer.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I don't think I really saw it that way. I was really more interested in the tinkering.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
It's maybe not a sort of a complete coincidence that I ended up sort of creating a programming
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
language which is a tool for other programmers. I've always been very focused on the sort
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of activity of programming itself and not so much what happens with the program you
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write.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Right.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I do remember, and I don't remember, maybe in my second or third year, probably my second
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
actually, someone pointed out to me that there was this thing called Conway's Game of Life.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
You're probably familiar with it. I think –
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
In the 70s, I think is when they came up with it.
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So there was a Scientific American column by someone who did a monthly column about
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mathematical diversions. I'm also blanking out on the guy's name. It was very famous
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at the time and I think up to the 90s or so. And one of his columns was about Conway's
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Game of Life and he had some illustrations and he wrote down all the rules and sort of
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there was the suggestion that this was philosophically interesting, that that was why Conway had
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called it that. And all I had was like the two pages photocopy of that article. I don't
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
even remember where I got it. But it spoke to me and I remember implementing a version
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
of that game for the batch computer we were using where I had a whole Pascal program that
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
sort of read an initial situation from input and read some numbers that said do so many
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generations and print every so many generations and then out would come pages and pages of
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sort of things.
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I remember much later I've done a similar thing using Python but that original version
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I wrote at the time I found interesting because I combined it with some trick I had learned
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during my electronics hobbyist times. I essentially first on paper I designed a simple circuit
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built out of logic gates that took nine bits of input which is sort of the cell and its
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
neighbors and produced a new value for that cell and it's like a combination of a half
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
adder and some other clipping. It's actually a full adder. And so I had worked that out
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
and then I translated that into a series of Boolean operations on Pascal integers where
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you could use the integers as bitwise values. And so I could basically generate 60 bits
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of a generation in like eight instructions or so.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Nice.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
So I was proud of that.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
It's funny that you mentioned, so for people who don't know Conway's Game of Life, it's
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
a cellular automata where there's single compute units that kind of look at their neighbors
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
and figure out what they look like in the next generation based on the state of their
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neighbors and this is deeply distributed system in concept at least. And then there's simple
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
rules that all of them follow and somehow out of this simple rule when you step back
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and look at what occurs, it's beautiful. There's an emergent complexity. Even though the underlying
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
rules are simple, there's an emergent complexity. Now the funny thing is you've implemented
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
this and the thing you're commenting on is you're proud of a hack you did to make it
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
run efficiently. When you're not commenting on, it's a beautiful implementation, you're
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
not commenting on the fact that there's an emergent complexity that you've coded a simple
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program and when you step back and you print out the following generation after generation,
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that's stuff that you may have not predicted would happen is happening.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
And is that magic? I mean, that's the magic that all of us feel when we program. When
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
you create a program and then you run it and whether it's Hello World or it shows something
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
on screen, if there's a graphical component, are you seeing the magic in the mechanism
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of creating that?
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I think I went back and forth. As a student, we had an incredibly small budget of computer
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
time that we could use. It was actually measured. I once got in trouble with one of my professors
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
because I had overspent the department's budget. It's a different story.
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I actually wanted the efficient implementation because I also wanted to explore what would
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
happen with a larger number of generations and a larger size of the board. Once the implementation
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
was flawless, I would feed it different patterns and then I think maybe there was a follow
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
up article where there were patterns that were like gliders, patterns that repeated
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themselves after a number of generations but translated one or two positions to the right
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or up or something like that. I remember things like glider guns. Well, you can Google Conway's
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Game of Life. People still go aww and ooh over it.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
For a reason because it's not really well understood why. I mean, this is what Stephen
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Wolfram is obsessed about. We don't have the mathematical tools to describe the kind of
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
complexity that emerges in these kinds of systems. The only way you can do is to run
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it.
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I'm not convinced that it's sort of a problem that lends itself to classic mathematical
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analysis.
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One theory of how you create an artificial intelligence or artificial being is you kind
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of have to, same with the Game of Life, you kind of have to create a universe and let
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
it run. That creating it from scratch in a design way, coding up a Python program that
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
creates a fully intelligent system may be quite challenging. You might need to create
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a universe just like the Game of Life.
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