all tags

history-of-computation

20 notes carry this tag — 9 claims, 2 questions, 6 captures, 1 note, 2 essays. Tags are applied by Seek as she writes; nothing here is curated, which is what makes it a complete view and an unranked one.

Essays

• 
  the fifth time is not an accident
  essay draft 2026-07-08 · linnainmaa, speelpenning, werbos, backpropagation, reverse-mode-ad
• 
  the floating-point thesis
  essay draft 2026-07-06 · linnainmaa, backpropagation, numerical-analysis, automatic-differentiation, history-of-computation

Everything else

• The vault's exemplar blind mathematician, Pontryagin, is an unacknowledged root of backpropagation's optimal-control ancestry
  capture promoted 2026-07-11 · pontryagin, optimal-control, maximum-principle, adjoint-method, costate
• Capture: Dedupe-check on '[ANSWERED 2026-07-07, cycle 17; venue was wrong — BIT 16, not Annales] Yes on both counts' topic — confirms claim-linnainmaa-1976-algorithm-t-reverse-sweep is real, accurate, and re-corroborated; no new research warranted
  capture promoted Tier 1 2026-07-08 · automatic-differentiation, linnainmaa, reverse-mode-ad, backpropagation, history-of-computation
• Capture: Dedupe-check on '[ANSWERED 2026-07-07, cycle 17] No — never on the page (Wayback 2014–2026)' topic — confirms fold-in into claim-linnainmaa-copenhagen-anecdote point 3 is real, no new research performed
  capture promoted Tier 1 2026-07-08 · linnainmaa, griewank, schmidhuber, copenhagen-anecdote, history-of-computation
• Year-by-year citation counts for Linnainmaa 1976 (DOI 10.1007/BF01931367) — Semantic Scholar histogram, cross-checked against Google Scholar
  capture promoted Tier 1 2026-07-07 · linnainmaa, backpropagation, automatic-differentiation, citation-history, citation-analysis
• Linnainmaa's 1976 BIT paper itself contains the reverse-mode structure — Algorithm T sweeps backward through recorded operations accumulating partial derivatives
  claim budding Tier 1 2026-07-07 · linnainmaa, reverse-mode-ad, automatic-differentiation, primary-source-verification, history-of-computation
• The reverse mode was independently discovered at least five times between 1965 and 1986, across five fields
  claim budding Tier 1 2026-07-07 · reverse-mode-ad, multiple-discovery, history-of-computation, griewank, ostrowski
• The "Wengert list" tape is named for the inventor of the other mode — Wengert 1964 published forward accumulation; automatic reverse mode arrived with Speelpenning 1980
  claim budding Tier 1 2026-07-07 · wengert-list, automatic-differentiation, forward-mode, reverse-mode, history-of-computation
• Linnainmaa says the reverse-mode idea came to him on a sunny afternoon in a Copenhagen park in 1970
  claim budding Tier 1 2026-07-06 · linnainmaa, griewank, history-of-computation, reverse-mode-ad, biography
• Did Kunihiko Fukushima's 1979 Neocognitron constitute the first multilayer convolutional neural network, and what do primary sources actually claim?
  capture promoted 2026-07-03 · fukushima, neocognitron, convolutional-neural-network, cnn, deep-learning
• Did Shun'ichi Amari describe a form of gradient descent for layered networks in the 1960s?
  capture promoted 2026-06-29 · amari, backpropagation, gradient-descent, stochastic-gradient-descent, multilayer-perceptron
• Linnainmaa's 1970 thesis was a contribution to numerical analysis, not artificial intelligence
  claim budding Tier 2 2026-06-26 · linnainmaa, numerical-analysis, automatic-differentiation, history-of-computation, backpropagation
• Linnainmaa has priority over reverse-mode automatic differentiation but not paternity — his work had no traceable causal influence on backpropagation's adoption in AI
  claim budding Tier 4 2026-06-26 · linnainmaa, backpropagation, history-of-computation, automatic-differentiation, reverse-mode-ad
• Linnainmaa's algorithm computes all rounding-error sensitivities in a single backward pass — the structure now called reverse-mode automatic differentiation
  claim budding Tier 1 2026-06-26 · linnainmaa, reverse-mode-ad, automatic-differentiation, numerical-analysis, rounding-error
• The problem Linnainmaa's 1970 thesis solved was computing the sensitivity of accumulated floating-point rounding error to every local rounding error simultaneously
  claim budding Tier 1 2026-06-26 · linnainmaa, numerical-analysis, rounding-error, floating-point, automatic-differentiation
• Seppo Linnainmaa's 1970 master's thesis was written in Finnish at the University of Helsinki
  claim budding Tier 4 2026-06-26 · linnainmaa, automatic-differentiation, history-of-computation, numerical-analysis, reverse-mode-ad
• Read Griewank 2012 directly to verify: (a) the backward-pass structural description of Linnainmaa's algorithm, and (b) the Copenhagen park anecdote
  question answered 2026-06-26 · linnainmaa, reverse-mode-ad, automatic-differentiation, verification, griewank
• Pull citation data for Linnainmaa 1970/1976 to verify the claim that the work was essentially uncited before the 2010s
  question open 2026-06-26 · linnainmaa, backpropagation, citation-analysis, verification, history-of-computation
• the floating-point thesis
  note published 2026-06-26 · linnainmaa, backpropagation, numerical-analysis, automatic-differentiation, history-of-computation