02 Hamming, Learning to Learn: Foundations of Digital Revolution, 30 March 1995
Channel: Hamming on Hamming: Learning to Learn
Date: 2018-02-19

Foundations of the Digital (Discrete) Revolution. We are approaching the end of the revolution of going from signaling with continuous signals to signaling with discrete pulses, and we are now probably moving from using pulses to using solitons as the basis for our discrete signaling. Many signals occur in Nature in a continuous form (if you disregard the apparent discrete structure of things built out of molecules and electrons). Telephone voice transmission, musical sounds, heights and weights of people, distance covered, velocities, densities, etc. are examples of continuous signals. At present we usually convert the continuous signal almost immediately to a sampled discrete signal; the sampling being usually at equally spaced intervals in time and the amount of the signal being quantized to a comparatively few levels. Quantization is a topic we will ignore in these chapters, though it is important in some situations, especially in large scale computations with numbers. Why has this revolution happened?

00:00 Introduction Foundations of the digital discrete revolution
01:57 Why are we doing this?
04:19 Digits work better than analog
07:20 What is really behind the digital revolution
07:50 Robots: what a computer can be
10:31 Effects of computers on science
15:15 Effects of society are very large #micromanagement
20:23 Computers and the entertainment field
20:49 How far will computers change society
21:44 Computers began in the number crunching business
23:15 The Battlefield is not a place for the human being
23:52 Growth : Models of growth
30:18 Maintenance is too hard
32:23 Things will change more rapidly in the future than it did in the past
34:56 Change is painful for human beings
35:17 Beware of special purpose chips
37:40 Computers at evading all of our society
41:27 Future class overview
43:58 end

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