Dr. Dobb's Journal August 1998
John von Neumann is remembered as one of the minds behind the the atomic bomb, game theory, and the digital computer. His contemporary, Norbert Wiener, is remembered chiefly for a word that has almost dropped out of the lexicon -- cybernetics.
The two knew and respected one another, and for a brief time considered working together on a dazzlingly challenging research program. When that plan failed, they went off in different directions, each of which led to one of the major computational paradigms of today. How the plan failed is a lesson on the impact of personality and politics on technological progress. Wiener was the stereotype of a mathematical genius, always looking for the new synthesis, while von Neumann was content early in his career to gain fame in solving existing problems. Wiener wanted respect for his academic achievements. von Neumann wanted to be close to power, and learned how to effect that.
Both did war work during WWII. Wiener was recruited by his friend Vannevar Bush to work on devising a way to reliably shoot down German missiles. von Neumann went to work on a more secret, more long-range project -- the atomic bomb.
Both continued to pursue computation and, in 1945, they made plans to create a research center to study the convergence of engineering and neurology -- to solve the puzzle of the brain and build artificial ones.
The center was really Wiener's dream. He used von Neumann's name to get the project approved at MIT. Meanwhile, von Neumann, then at Princeton, just wanted to build a successor to ENIAC, and he needed money to do it. When he showed the offer from MIT to Princeton, they showed him the money. von Neumann's work at Princeton defined the stored-program computer model.
von Neumann got what he wanted at Wiener's expense. The center never opened. But Wiener did continue to work with the bright scientists he had wanted to attract to the center, including Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. It was McCulloch and Pitts' subsequent development of a model of the neuron that inspired neural networks.
If von Neumann hadn't dynamited Wiener's dream, the architecture of computation might have developed quite differently.
--M.S.