John von Neumann Quotes

The classical definitions of free competition all involve further postulates besides the greatness of that number. E.g., it is clear that if certain great groups of participants will — for any reason whatsoever — act together, then the great number of participants may not become effective; the decisive exchanges may take place directly between large “coalitions,”1 few in number, and not between individuals, many in number, acting independently. Our subsequent discussion of “games of strategy” will show that the role and size of “coalitions” is decisive throughout the entire subject.

The very last stage of any memory hierarchy is necessarily the outside world — that is, the outside world as far as the machine is concerned, i.e. that part of it with which the machine can directly communicate, in other words, the input and the output organs of the machine. These are usually punched paper tapes or cards, and on the output side, of course, also printed paper.

We do not know where in the physically viewed nervous system a memory resides; we do not know whether it is a separate organ or a collection of specific parts of other already known organs, etc.

The McCulloch-Pitts result . . . proves that anything that can be exhaustively and unambiguously described, anything that can be completely and unambiguously put into words, is ipso facto realizable by a suitable finite neural network.

A code, which according to Turing's schema is supposed to make one machine behave as if it were another specific machine (which is supposed to make the former imitate the latter) must do the following things. It must contain, in terms that the machine will understand (and purposively obey), instructions (further detailed parts of the code) that will cause the machine to examine every order it gets and determine whether this order has the structure appropriate to an order of the second machine. It must then contain, in terms of the order system of the first machine, sufficient orders to make the machine cause the actions to be taken that the second machine would have taken under the influence of the order in question.

He notes that the output of neurons is digital: an axon either fires or it doesn’t. This was far from obvious at the time, in that the output could have been an analog signal. The processing in the dendrites leading into a neuron and in the soma neuron cell body, however, are analog. He describes these calculations as a weighted sum of inputs with a threshold.

No, No, Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now, real games,’ he said, ‘are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.