W. Daniel hillis was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1956. He is a contemporary writer.he is a famous computer scientist, and participated in the design of the fastest computer in the world, with 34 patents in the United States. He is also one of the chief scientists and founders of Thinking Machine Company and the chief designer of its main product: Connection Machine. Hillis is also the editor of several scientific journals, including Artificial Life, Complexity, Complex System and Future Generation Computer Systems. His works include The Connection Machine.
Next, I introduce his life experience, because Daniel hillis's mother engaged in teaching made him particularly interested in mathematics at an early age, and his father was an infectious disease expert, so he also had a strong interest in biology, which made him curious and practical. In primary school, hillis made his first "computer" with a single player and two disks. In junior high school, I learned basic concepts such as "Yes or No" and Boolean algebra from george boole's The Law of Thinking. In 1974, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was determined to study the working principle of the brain. Until he was a graduate student, he kept thinking about this question: The neurons in our brain can perform thousands of calculations at most every second. Can the computer operate so fast? And about how to surpass the electronic computer whose circuit can be switched in a few thousandths of a second in so many tasks? He believes that the answer is massive parallelism: there are many more "processors" in the brain than computers, and they can coordinate well to complete face recognition and abstract thinking together. He studied intelligent computers with biology under the guidance of MarvinMinsky, the founder of the artificial intelligence laboratory of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He designed a computer with 1 million small processors, hoping to integrate brain functions into silicon chips, and set up a ThinkingMachines company. Many authorities in computer science said that this idea would not succeed, but adventurers like William Paley, president of CBS, still provided him with funds, and the National Defense Advanced Research and Planning Agency (ARPA) ordered goods from him supportively. Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner and famous physicist, helped him analyze the Internet in the machine, and helped to construct the model. Most importantly, Feynman gave hillis a lot of spiritual support. Facts have proved that hillis's machine can be used in many aspects, from oil exploration to stock price prediction.
In the end, his conclusion was recognized by the scientific community. As long as the problems to be dealt with are large enough and the network is fast enough, large-scale parallelism is very effective. At present, hillis's research focuses on biochips. He tries to see if his machine can reveal the mechanism of evolution by simulating thousands of generations of life. This work is called the experiment of evolution in silicon chip and creating artificial life.