Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
A trumpet that shoots fire
Tinkering after fame
He had finished his path-breaking work by the age of 32 and could have spent his remaining decades as a scientific celebrity. He tinkered instead. He built an electronic maze-solving mouse, a chess-playing computer, the first wearable computer, and a calculator that operated in Roman numerals. He kept a fleet of customized unicycles and spent years on the scientific study of juggling.
The MIT years
After more than a decade and a half at Bell Labs, a move to MIT brought out his most whimsical work. Besides the fire-breathing trumpet and the chairlift, there were handmade unicycles, a machine that solved Rubik's cubes, more chess-playing machines, and more handmade robots, including a juggling one. His mind was finally free to bring his most outlandish ideas to mechanical life.
Hobbies as experiments
He treated what other people called hobbies as experiments, exercises in the practice of simplification, models that filed a problem down to its barest interesting form. He was preoccupied with the possible capabilities and applications of large-scale electronic computers at a time when nothing like them existed, and he was willing to put up with some ridicule while he explored them.
How did Shannon's maze-solving mouse learn?
The machine, called Theseus and shown in 1950, was a magnetized mouse moved by an electromagnet under the floor of a maze. Relay circuits under the maze remembered which direction the mouse had left each square. On its first run it searched by trial and error, and on later runs it went straight to the goal. It is often cited as one of the earliest demonstrations of machine learning.
How did the first wearable computer work?
In 1961 Shannon and the mathematician Edward Thorp built a computer about the size of a cigarette pack to predict roulette. The wearer clicked a toe switch to time the ball and the rotor, and the computer sent tones to a tiny earpiece. They tested it in Las Vegas that year. Thorp later reported an expected gain of about 44 percent per bet in testing.
Why did Shannon build a Roman numeral calculator?
It was a joke machine called THROBAC, short for Thrifty Roman-numeral Backward-looking Computer, built around 1953. It used relays to add, subtract, multiply, and divide in Roman numerals and showed its answers in Roman numerals too. It could also take square roots. Many of Shannon's machines are now held at the MIT Museum.
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