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From Analog to Digital and Back
Bits are the new electrons. The nature of analog computing is to take control.
In July 1716, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a 70-year-old lawyer, philosopher, and mathematician whose “tragedy was that he met the lawyers before the scientists,” joined Peter the Great, the 44-year-old tsar of Russia, in taking the cure at Bad Pyrmont in Saxony, drinking mineral water instead of alcohol for the duration of their eight-day stay.
Leibniz, who would be dead within the year, laid three grand projects before the tsar. First was a proposal to send an overland expedition across Siberia to the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Pacific, where one or more oceangoing vessels would be launched on a voyage of discovery to determine whether Asia and America were separated, and if so, where? What languages were spoken by the inhabitants, and could this shed light on the origins and evolution of the human race? Were the rivers navigable? How does the magnetic declination vary with location, and does it also vary in time? What lay between the Russian Far East and the American Northwest? Could Russia extend its claims?
Second was a proposal to establish a Russian academy of sciences, modeled on the success of the existing European academies while leaving their infirmities behind.
Third was a plan to use digital computers “to work out, by an infallible calculus, the doctrines most useful for life, that is, those of morality and metaphysics,” by encoding natural language and its underlying concepts through a numerical mapping to an alphabet of primes. Leibniz sought Peter’s support to introduce this calculus ratiocinator to China, whose philosophers he credited with the invention of binary arithmetic, and to adopt this system in the tsar’s campaign for the modernization and expansion of Russia, which Leibniz saw as a tabula rasa, or blank slate, upon which his vision of a rational society based on science, logic, and machine intelligence might play out.
“The human race will have a new kind of instrument which will increase the power of the mind much more than optical lenses strengthen the eyes,” he argued. “Reason will be right beyond all doubt only when it is everywhere as clear and certain as only arithmetic has been until now.” Leibniz observed…
