The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

Lastly, in a sense this is a religious course: I am preaching the message that, with apparently only one life to live on this earth, you ought to try to make significant contributions to humanity rather than just get along through life comfortably—that the life of trying to achieve excellence in some area is in itself a worthy goal for your life.

And at least one friend of mine has said, behind my back, “Hamming doesn’t seem to understand error correcting codes!” He is probably right; I do not understand what I invented as clearly as he does.

Let me repeat myself: artificial intelligence is not a subject you can afford to ignore; your attitude will put you in the front or the rear of the applications of machines in your field, but also may lead you into a really great fiasco!

Recall, again, sending through space is the same as sending through time, namely storage. If you have information and want it later, you encode it for storage and store it. Later, when you want it, it is decoded. Among encoding systems is the identity, no change in the representation.

Notice first this essential step happened only because there was a great deal of emotional stress on me at the moment, and this is characteristic of most great discoveries. Working calmly will let you elaborate and extend things, but the breakthroughs generally come only after great frustration and emotional involvement. The calm, cool, uninvolved researcher seldom makes really great new steps.