Think of oneself as a machine can be a liberating idea-because whatever you might dislike about yourself, that might be caused by a bug you could fix! If you think of yourself in terms of "I", then you'll see yourself as a single thing, which has no parts to change or rearrange. But using myself "My" can help you to envision yourself as composed of parts, which could enable you to imagine specific changes that might improve your ways to think. (查看原文)
You have your goals. I call the way you will operate to achieve your goals your machine. It consists of a design (the things that have to get done) and the people (who will do the things that need getting done). Those people include you and those who help you. For example, imagine that your goal is a military one: to take a hill from an enemy. Your design for your “machine” might include two scouts, two snipers, four infantrymen, and so on. While the right design is essential, it is only half the battle. It is equally important to put the right people in each of those positions. They need different qualities to do their jobs well—the scouts must be fast runners, the snipers must be good marksmen—so that the machine will produce the outcomes you seek. (查看原文)
They only tell about commands and instructions and programming-language grammar rules. They hardly ever give examples. But real languages are more than words and grammar rules. We always start with stories about things that interest us. (查看原文)
Many adults just don't have the right kinds of words to talk about such things-or the kinds of ideas that could help them think of them. They just don't know what to think when little kids converse about "representations" and "simulations" and "recursive procedures." Be tolerant. Adults have enough problems of their own. (查看原文)
A key difficulty in learning "powerful ideas" is that we always start "where we are," and try to fit new ideas and things into what we already think we know. If the new ideas/things are very different, then we often either bypass them entirely or force them into distorted meanings that fit our current "private universe": the one between our ears! Marvin would like children to always have the thought: "I think this idea/thing is this way, but it could also be another way, and it could be made from things I'm not thinking about at all." (Marvin was great at this rule of thumb!)-by Alan Kay (查看原文)
When Turing was quite young, he realized that what a computer does only depends on the states of its parts-and on the laws that change its states. Except for that, it doesn't matter how the parts are made. Turing asked what are programs? He then realized that you could think of programs as just sets of states or, rather, as ways to pre-arrange how a computer will, later, change its states. (查看原文)
