It's awe inspiring the fact that 100 years ago we were just beginning to experiment with flight. Now we are looking at quantum computers, gene therapy, a colony on Mars, and so much more. Life has been going on for three billion years. It's almost impossible to describe how rapid the recent change in technology has been. The future will be one hell of a sight if we make it that far.

Margaret Hamilton was the leader of the team that developed the flight software for the agency's Apollo missions. The concepts she and her team created became the building blocks for modern 'software engineering.' One example of the value of Hamilton's software work occurred during the Apollo 11 mission. Approximately three minutes before Eagle's touchdown on the moon, the software over rode a command to switch the flight computer's priority processing to a radar system whose 'on' switch had been manually activated due to a faulty written operations script provided to the crew. The action by the software permitted the mission to safely continue.

Source: http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11Hamilton.html ...

A Turing machine is a hypothetical machine thought of by the mathematician Alan Turing in 1936. Despite its simplicity, the machine can simulate ANY computer algorithm, no matter how complicated it is.

Put simply, the Turing machine isn't a physical machine, but you can imagine it as an never-ending line of tape, broken down into squares. On each of those squares is a 1, a 0, or nothing at all. The machine reads one square at a time, and depending on what it reads, it performs an action - it either erases the number and writes a new one before moving on, or simply moves on to a different square.

Each of those actions, which mathematicians call a 'state', are determined by the mathematical algorithm or problem the Turing machine has been desi ...

While it's hard to calculate the memory capacity of the human brain, some estimates have put the number closer to 2.5 petabytes. But this is a great rough comparison.

The program builds on previous research and uses a mathematical model to determine which letter the test subject was thinking about at the time of the scan. Researchers hope to refine this technology in the future in order to reconstruct memories or dreams.