26 points | by dxs 2 days ago
5 comments
See, Scientific American says that a woman’s code underpins the Internet.
https://archive.ph/VlbdQ
> If this was 2025, this would be called machine learning because that's really what it was.
It would be called "machine learning" because that's the buzzword du jour.
> She was teaching the network to learn how to respond to nodes dropping out.
That's just called "writing software" not "teaching the network."
> Machine learning was definitely nonexistent at that point.
Are you sure about that?
> And yet, if you look at this 1964 paper, it's kind of unquestionably what it is.
The document: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3103.html
The claim: highly questionable.
The paper is interesting in it's own right, but, to hype it up in this way is gross.
TLDR: Sharla Boehm helped invent packet switching, a.k.a. "hot potato routing", and wrote the first implementation which proved that it could work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharla_Boehm
[And/But] whose code is [/not] present in today’s packet routing code
Do we know which?
See, Scientific American says that a woman’s code underpins the Internet.
https://archive.ph/VlbdQ
> If this was 2025, this would be called machine learning because that's really what it was.
It would be called "machine learning" because that's the buzzword du jour.
> She was teaching the network to learn how to respond to nodes dropping out.
That's just called "writing software" not "teaching the network."
> Machine learning was definitely nonexistent at that point.
Are you sure about that?
> And yet, if you look at this 1964 paper, it's kind of unquestionably what it is.
The document: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3103.html
The claim: highly questionable.
The paper is interesting in it's own right, but, to hype it up in this way is gross.
TLDR: Sharla Boehm helped invent packet switching, a.k.a. "hot potato routing", and wrote the first implementation which proved that it could work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharla_Boehm
[And/But] whose code is [/not] present in today’s packet routing code
Do we know which?