Registered: Oct 2003
Posts: 13

At the end of my post about the 100th anniversary of John von Neumann's birth, I mentioned that his daughter had told me about a box to be opened on the 50th anniversary of his death. That anniversary is today.

And being reminded of this last week, I sent mail to his daughter to ask what had become of the box.

Disappointingly, she responded that: "The Big Box opening turned out to be a Big Bust". Apparently she and her children and their grandchildren had all assembled ... only to discover that it was all a big mistake: the box was actually not John von Neumann's at all!

Perhaps it for the best. Von Neumann's daughter sent me a piece she wrote about him, pointing out the unpredictability (irreducibility?) of technological and other change---and expressing concern that our species might wipe itself out by the year 1980.

Fortunately that of course hasn't happened. And it was recently suggested to me that perhaps The Box might contain some Cold-War-inspired plan for a Dr.-Strangelove-like Doomsday Machine. So---"von Neumann machine" self-replicators notwithstanding---it's perhaps just as well that in the end there was no box.

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