Chip design

About ten years ago I was at a dinner party where I met an Intel engineer who was working on the design of one of the Pentium series of microprocessors. He told me many fascinating things about the design process, and stated that there was no one person who came even close to understanding the chip in its entirety. Instead, Intel has fashioned a very clever social process where that is not necessary, and the engineers working on the chip only understand it collectively.

I’m wondering if any of my readers know of any illuminating references on the social aspects of the design process for modern microprocessors? I’d be interesting in anything from a few sentences through to an entire book. My immediate need is for a single number – how many engineers are involved in designing a new chip – but I’m also interested to learn more. I’d be fascinated if anyone knows of any connection between those social process and the famous Pentium floating point bug. Thanks in advance for any assistance!

Update: John Dupuis points me to the book The Pentium Chronicles:The People, Passion, and Politics Behind Intel’s Landmark Chips, which looks very promising. Other suggestions would still be very much appreciated, though!

Update 2: More reference goodness from John Dupuis. This time it’s a paper by Bell and Kastelic entitled “Inside Intel-coping with complex projects”. Many fascinating facts at first glance – the Itanium team involved up to 650 engineers and mask designers, and 4500 person-years of work – but I’ve got to run, and have no time to digest right now.

Biweekly links for 12/07/2009

  • Networks, Crowds, and Markets: A Book by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg
  • Continuous Partial Attention – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • Is Google Making Us Stupid? – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    • The Wikipedia article on Nicholas Carr’s well-known article. Something I find fascinating is how good the Wikipedia article is – maybe Google is making us stupid, but Wikipedia certainly isn’t.
  • Chromoscope
    • Chromoscope is amazing – view the Milky Way at many different wavelengths.
  • Jared Diamond: Will Big Business Save the Earth?
    • Interesting article by Diamond. Not quantitatively convincing, of course – it’s an NYT op-ed – but does challenge much conventional wisdom in the green movement.
  • Fact-Checkers and Certified Public Logicians Boing Boing
    • “I have wondered for years, as magazines, newspapers, and other news organizations have been hemorrhaging money and employees, why someone hasn’t gone into the contract fact-checking business. Like, it could be an extension of Snopes.com. There’s a huge redundancy in every publication having their own research desks, so they could lay off all of their fact-checkers and then outsource the job to the new, independent company that the best of them then all go to work for. Meanwhile, the company could also be hired by anyone else. Then, when the public sees the “Fact-Checked by MiniTrue (SM)” seal on someone’s independent blog, they know the information there has the same credibility as the big boys.”
  • Less Wrong: Parapsychology: the control group for science
    • I don’t buy this – parapsychologists who consistently get negative results (“still no telepathy”) are thrown out of the tribe – but it’s intriguing nonetheless: “Imagine if, way back at the start of the scientific enterprise, someone had said, “What we really need is a control group for science – people who will behave exactly like scientists, doing experiments, publishing journals, and so on, but whose field of study is completely empty: one in which the null hypothesis is always true.

      “That way, we’ll be able to gauge the effect of publication bias, experimental error, misuse of statistics, data fraud, and so on, which will help us understand how serious such problems are in the real scientific literature.”

      Isn’t that a great idea?

      By an accident of historical chance, we actually have exactly such a control group, namely parapsychologists: people who study extra-sensory perception, telepathy, precognition, and so on.”

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

Pessimism as hubris

It seems to me that pessimism in the face of major problems is sometimes an act of hubris. I sometimes find myself pessimistic simply because I don’t see any way of solving major problems such as securing the world’s nuclear materials (still a surprisingly scary problem), or solving the climate change problem. But, of course, just because I don’t personally see how to solve a problem doesn’t mean a solution won’t come from a direction I don’t expect, and perhaps have never even heard of. I remember many discussions of nuclear war in my school in the early 1980s, and the mood was always very dark; no-one anticipated that the breakup of the whole eastern bloc was just a few years away.

Taken too far, this point of view can lead to foolish optimism: “someone will save us!” The ideal frame of mind seems to be to balance optimism, on the grounds that there is far more ingenuity in the world than we are aware of, with a certain amount of pessimism, to remain strongly motivated to act ourselves. The sky really has fallen on some civilizations.

Biweekly links for 11/30/2009

  • How I Hire Programmers (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)
    • Much more interesting than the traditional approach, which seems to be a hybrid of the Microsoft and Google approaches.
  • Wikimedia blog » Blog Archive » Wikipedia’s Volunteer Story
    • “What’s happening to Wikipedia’s volunteer community? Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages”. The article is a comprehensive description of the challenges and opportunities facing the Wikipedia community… A quote from the article: “In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega.”

      Other news stories have further focused on this particular number, some going so far to predict Wikipedia’s imminent demise… It’s understandable that media will look for a compelling narrative. Our job is to arrive at a nuanced understanding of what’s going on. This blog post is therefore an attempt to dig deeper into the numbers and into what’s happening with Wikipedia’s volunteer community, and to describe our big picture strategy.”

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

Biweekly links for 11/27/2009

  • So, Where’s My Robot?
    • Social machine learning blog from Andrea Thomaz
  • Reddit interview with former Director-General of the World Trade Organisation
  • Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data — Schmidt and Lipson 324 (5923): 81 — Science
    • “A key challenge to finding analytic relations automatically is defining algorithmically what makes a correlation in observed data important and insightful. We propose a principle for the identification of nontriviality. We demonstrated this approach by automatically searching motion-tracking data captured from various physical systems, ranging from simple harmonic oscillators to chaotic double-pendula. Without any prior knowledge about physics, kinematics, or geometry, the algorithm discovered Hamiltonians, Lagrangians, and other laws of geometric and momentum conservation. The discovery rate accelerated as laws found for simpler systems were used to bootstrap explanations for more complex systems, gradually uncovering the “alphabet” used to describe those systems.”
  • Statistical Learning as the Ultimate Agile Development Tool
    • Excellent lecture from Peter Norvig. Interesting ideas include: the phrase “data-driven programming”; evidence that a bad algorithm with lots of data may outperform a good algorithm with less data; the idea that it may be possible to solve very complex problems with incredibly simple programs and lots of data.
  • Rambles at starchamber.com » Blog Archive » Information obesity
    • “It occurred to me that I was suffering from information obesity. Prosperity has caused most of us to go from problems associated too little food to problems associated with too much food. Until you adjust to the change, hoarding and binging can make you fat, sick, and miserable. Once I started thinking about information the same way, I could just picture the greasy fat folds in my brain.”
  • LibriVox
    • “LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain.”
  • Galaxy Zoo Blog » Galaxy Zoo: Understanding Cosmic Mergers
    • A new Galaxy Zoo subproject: “Starting at midnight 11/24, our new site ‘Galaxy Zoo: Understanding Cosmic Mergers’ went on-line as a new project in Galaxy Zoo. In Mergers, we are working to understand the cosmic collisions that lead to galaxy mergers. Every day we will have a new target galaxy that we need your help to model. Based on the basic input parameters that we provide, a Java applet running in your browser will simulate some possible collision scenarios. Computers don’t do a good job comparing simulations and real astronomical images, so we need your help to find out which simulations are the most similar to the real galaxy collision.”
  • The Happiness Project: A Little-Known Occupational Hazard Affecting Writers.
    • Yup: “There’s a very common occupational hazard that affects writers, but I’ve never heard anyone talk about it: the desire to write outside your main field… Of course, you can choose what you write about. You just can’t choose what you want to write about.”
  • Einstein Declines
    • 1952 article in Time Magazine about Einstein declining the offer to become the second President of Israel.

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

Biweekly links for 11/23/2009

  • Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization « Clay Shirky
    • Shirky on the future of bookstores.
  • Charlie Stross on reading and the book business
    • A very short, interesting tidbit from Stross.
  • bit-player
    • Brian Hayes’ excellent blog on computing and mathematics
  • An Unstoppable Force Meets…: INTERNETPOKERS: Poker Blog
    • Great upheavals in the world of high-stakes online poker.
  • Corrupted Blood incident – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    • “The Corrupted Blood incident was a widely reported virtual plague outbreak and video game glitch found in the … game World of Warcraft… The plague began on September 13, 2005, when an area was introduced in a new update. One boss could cast a spell called Corrupted Blood, which would deal a certain amount of damage over a period of time, and which could be transferred from character to character. It was intended to be exclusive to this area, but players discovered ways to take it out, causing an epidemic across several servers. During the epidemic, some players would help combat the disease by volunteering healing services, while select others would maliciously spread the disease. These people have been compared to real-world disease spreaders, including early AIDS patient Gaëtan Dugas and Typhoid patient Mary Mallon… [World of Warcraft creator] Blizzard [was forced] to do a hard reset of all of its servers for the game.”
  • Access denied? : Article : Nature
    • “Every weekday, thousands of researchers around the world access the Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), which contains the most reliable and up-to-date genomic information available on the most widely used model organism in the plant kingdom. But now, to those users’ horror, TAIR faces collapse: the US National Science Foundation (NSF) is phasing out funding after 10 years as the data resource’s sole supporter (see page 258).

      TAIR’s plight is emblematic of a broader crisis facing many of the world’s biological databases and repositories. Research funding agencies recognize that such infrastructures are crucial to the ongoing conduct of science, yet few are willing to finance them indefinitely. Such agencies tend to support these resources during the development phase, but then expect them to find sustainable funding elsewhere.”

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

Biweekly links for 11/20/2009

  • Your Looks and Your Inbox « OkTrends
    • Utterly fascinating data-driven look at the dating market from someone who helps run a dating site.
  • Google Scholar now lets you restrict your search to legal opinions and journals
    • I use Scholar’s advanced search pretty often, and only just noticed this – I presume it was added recently. Should be very handy.
  • Damn Cool Pics: Best Hand Painting Art Ever
    • The title appears hyperbolic, but this is remarkable. I often had no idea I was looking at hand.
  • Steven Pinker on technology
    • “Many of the articles in printed encyclopedias stink — they are incomprehensible, incoherent, and instantly obsolete. The vaunted length of the news articles in our daily papers is generally plumped out by filler that is worse than useless: personal-interest anecdotes, commentary by ignoramuses, pointless interviews with bystanders (“My serial killer neighbor was always polite and quiet”). Precious real-estate in op-ed pages is franchised to a handful of pundits who repeatedly pound their agenda or indulge in innumerate riffing (such as interpreting a “trend” consisting of a single observation). The concept of “science” in many traditional literary-cultural-intellectual magazines… is personal reflections by belletristic doctors. And the policy that a serious book should be evaluated in a publication of record by a single reviewer (with idiosyncratic agendas, hobbyhorses, jealousies, tastes, and blind spots) would be risible if we hadn’t grown up with it.”
  • A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority « Clay Shirky
    • “when people become aware not just of their own trust but of the trust of others: “I use Wikipedia all the time, and other members of my group do as well.” Once everyone in the group has this realization, checking Wikipedia is tantamount to answering the kinds of questions Wikipedia purports to answer, for that group. This is the transition to algorithmic authority. “
  • Geo Hashing
    • “Geohashing is a method for finding an effectively random location nearby and visiting it: a Spontaneous Adventure Generator. Every day, the algorithm generates a new set of coordinates for each 1°×1° latitude/longitude zone (known as a graticule) in the world. The coordinates can be anywhere — in the forest, in a city, on a mountain, or even in the middle of a lake! Everyone in a given region gets the same set of coordinates relative to their graticule.

      As such, these coordinates can be used as destinations for adventures, à la Geocaching, or for local meetups.”

  • Zeroth Order Approximation: Summary dismissal
    • When is it appropriate to dismiss an idea out of hand? “So I am not opposed in principle to the “summary dismissal” of an idea – a rejection that precedes a full discussion of the factual merits. Such judgments are necessary and inevitable. They are a legitimate part of the practical art of reason. Yet I am uneasy, because this kind of preemptive action carries obvious risks. After all, the idea that I reject might be a good one. If I never grant it a real hearing, how will I ever find out?”

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

Biweekly links for 11/16/2009

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

The Wikipedia Paradox

To determine whether any given subject deserves an entry, Wikipedia uses the criterion of notability. This lead to an interesting question:

Question 1: What’s the most notable subject that’s not notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia?

Let’s assume for now that this question has an answer (“The Answer”), and call the corresponding subject X. Now, we have a second question whose answer is not at all obvious.

Question 2: Is subject X notable merely by being The Answer?

If the answer to Question 2 is “no”, then there’s no problem, and we can all go home.

If the answer to Question 2 is “yes”, well, we have a contradiction, and in a manner similar to the interesting number paradox, it follows that Question 1 must have no answer, and so every conceivable subject must meet Wikipedia’s notability criterion.

Take that, deletionists!

Here’s the amusing thing: whether the answer to Question 2 is yes or no depends on where I publish this analysis. If I publish it on my blog and no-one pays any attention, the answer to Question 2 is, most Wikipedians would likely agree, “no”.

But suppose I went to great trouble to convene a conference series on The Answer, was able to convince leading logicians and philosophers to take part, writing papers about The Answer, convinced a prestigious journal to publish the proceedings, arranged media coverage, and so on. The Answer would then certainly have exceeded Wikipedia’s notability guidelines, and thus the answer to Question 2 would be “yes”.

In other words, whether this is a paradox or not depends on where it’s been published 🙂

(This line of thought was inspired by a lunchtime conversation two years ago with a group of physicists. I don’t remember who, or I’d spread the blame.)

Update: A number of people have made comments along the lines of “But aren’t you assuming a well-ordering” / “What if the most notable article isn’t unique” and so on. It’s easy to modify Question 1 to deal with this: all that’s needed is (a) for the set of non-notable subjects to be well-defined; and (b) for there to be some way to pick out a unique one from that set. Point (a) is, of course, debatable, but outside the scope of the game, which starts by assuming that the Notability policy is well-defined to start with. With that, point (b) follows because the set of possible subjects on Wikipedia is a subset of the set of unicode strings, and is thus countable.