📸 Photo

tangles, links, and webs

would create a node that represented the sequence. Whenever the same sequence occurred again, instead of repeating it, Tangle just put a reference to the original node. As more phrases were stored as nodes, and more pointers pointed to them, a series of connections formed.

The philosophy was: What matters is in the connections. It isn't the letters, it's the way they're strung together into words. It isn't the words, it's the way they're strung together into phrases. It isn't the phrases, it's the way they're strung together into a document. I imagined putting in an encyclopedia this way, then asking Tangle a question. The question would be broken down into nodes, which would then refer to wherever the same nodes appeared in the encyclopedia. The resulting tangle would contain all the relevant answers.

I tested Tangle by putting in the phrase "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?" The machine thought for a bit and encoded my phrase in what was a very complex, tangled data structure. But when I asked it to regurgitate what it had encoded, it would follow through all the nodes and output again, "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?" I was feeling pretty confident, so I tried it on "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" It thought for a while, encoded it, and when I asked it to decode, it replied: "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck chuck wood chuck chuck chuck wood wood chuck chuck chuck . . ." and it went on forever. The mess it had made was so horrendously difficult to debug that I never touched it again. That was the end of Tangle—but not the end of my desire to represent the connective aspect of information.

I had always stayed on the boundary of hardware and software, which was an important and exciting place to be, especially as software more and more took over hardware functions. When I applied for my fellowship to CERN, I specified that I wanted a job that would allow me to work on both, and suggested three places there where I could do that. I ended up being hired to