1010: Ten Computers in Ten Months

Dear The Internet,

I’m starting a crazy project, and I need your help. 1010 is a scope-restricted, long form variant of the “N in N” schemes you may have heard of before (7 in 7, 4 in 4). But instead of a fast-paced but freeform event, 1010 will be slow and focused and bounded: I will build ten computers in ten months.

My motivation? I miss hacking hardware. As a coder it’s easy to forget about the secret world of silicon and copper. So to get back into it, I’m going to design and build some hardware, and you’re going to keep me honest. I’m not talking about assembling my own Linux box with some fancy motherboard and high-end graphics card and lots of cursing about drivers. Oh, no. I’m going to get neck deep in implementation details, sketch out machine architectures, devise instruction sets, and wire data busses by hand. This is gonna be hardcore.

The rules:

• Build one Turing-Complete computation device each month for ten consecutive months. (Bonus points for esoteric hardware that still computes.)

• Devices must be started and completed in the same calendar month. (Yes, August has advantages over February; deal.)

• Each computation device needs to be user-programmable to run arbitrary code. Devices will be documented and posted on the 1010 web site by the last day of the month, with example code.

Is Gruber Tweeting About Sports?

So some friends had this awesome idea over a few beers, and I coded it up. It’s been running for about a month now.

So then Gruber goes ahead and starts tweeting about sports, and I go ahead and tweet about the helpful website we made. And then Gruber retweets me and all hell breaks loose. My server has been cowering in the corner ever since. Please be nice to it.

P ≠ NP

OK, folks. Pack your bags and go home. It’s been real.

But seriously, if this holds up (scribd), one of the great problems in computer science will have been solved.

While I heard some buzz over the past few years that a solution may be close, I always believed we’d be forever caught in an Achillean approach. I never thought someone would find a definitive solution in my lifetime. Wow.

When You Can’t Afford a Visionary

I recently attended a lunch presentation by a prominent investor in New York’s startup scene, and he got remarkably animated when crowdsourcing came up. Part of his lecture was an account of an entrepreneur who wanted a logo on the cheap. Instead of finding a designer, negotiating price, and critiquing endless revisions, the founder offered a bounty of $300 on a spec design site, and waited. Within hours, according to the story, he had over 200 logo candidates, from designers all over the world.

There are two problems with this process. First, it exploits designers. One lucky designer got three hundred bucks, and the vast remainder got nothing more than a “no thanks.” Horror stories abound, however, about undervalued designers—here’s one: in 1971, Carolyn Davidson was paid $35 for the Nike swoosh—this is not a new thing, and I don’t think it’s the issue in this story.

The more troubling problem with spec sites is that the problem-solving and curatorial processes that traditionally belonged to the designer are shifted to the client.

When Paul Rand was asked to design a logo for Next Computer, he said his job was to solve the problem to the best of his ability. The deliverable was not a buffet of choices or a palette of options, but a single solution to the problem at hand. (Steve Jobs talks about the experience of working with Rand in this interview.)

The designer’s job is to immerse herself in the problem, distill it to its essence, and uncover the elegant solution. Only one part of the designer’s job is to push pixels in Illustrator. Equally important, and equally lacking from spec sites, are problem solving and curation. What use is it to be presented with a couple hundred similarly mediocre logotypes? How do you select the best one? Do you let the crowd pick? Design by committee is an anti-pattern that can only find local maxima. You need a visionary to get to the summit.

Kangxi Radical Cow

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