Edward Fredkin

Fredkin has had formal and informal associations with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) over several decades. His current academic interests are in the area of digital mechanics, which is the study of discrete models of fundamental process in physics. Fredkin has been a Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science at CMU. and also a visiting scientist at MIT Media Laboratory. As of 2022, he is Distinguished Career Professor of Robotics at CMU.

Fredkin also worked at the intersection of theoretical issues in the physics of computation with computational models of physics. He invented the SALT Cellular Automata family. Dan Miller designed and programmed the Busy Boxes implementation of Salt, with assistance from Suresh Kumar Devanathan. The early SALT models are 2+1 dimensional quasi-physical, reversible, universal cellular automata, that are second order in time, and that follow rules that model CPT reversibility.(Miller & Fredkin 2005) harv error: no target: CITEREFMillerFredkin2005 (help).

A layman's profile of Fredkin, along with a readable explanation of some of his theories, can be found in the first part of Three Scientists and Their Gods by Robert Wright (1988). The section of the book covering Fredkin was excerpted in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1988.

In 1984, Fredkin was awarded the Carnegie Mellon University Dickson Prize in Science, given annually to the person who has been judged to have made the most progress in a scientific field in the United States during that year. In 1999, CMU established the Fredkin professorship.

Fredkin's primary contributions include work on reversible computing and cellular automata. While Konrad Zuse's book, Calculating Space (1969), mentioned the importance of reversible computation, the Fredkin gate represented the essential breakthrough. In recent work, he uses the term digital philosophy (DP).

In 1968, Fredkin returned to academia, starting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a full professor. From 1971 to 1974, Fredkin was the Director of Project MAC at MIT. (Project MAC was renamed the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in 1976.) He spent a year at Caltech as a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar, working with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, and was a Professor of Physics at Boston University for six years.

In 1962, he founded Information International, Inc., an early computer technology company which developed high-precision digital-to-film scanners, as well as other leading-edge hardware.

Fredkin wrote a PDP-1 assembler language called FRAP (Free of Rules Assembly Program, also sometimes called Fredkin's Assembly Program), and its first operating system (OS). He organized and founded the Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society (DECUS) in 1961, and participated in its early projects. Working directly with Ben Gurley, the designer of the PDP-1, Fredkin designed significant modifications to the hardware to support time-sharing via the BBN Time-Sharing System. He invented and designed the first modern interrupt system, which Digital called the "Sequence Break". He went on to become a contributor in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

At age 19, Fredkin left California Institute of Technology (Caltech) after a year to join the United States Air Force (USAF) to become a fighter pilot. Fredkin’s computer career started in 1956 when the air force assigned him to MIT Lincoln Laboratory where we worked on the SAGE computer.

Fredkin's initial focus was physics; however, he became involved with computers in 1956 when he was sent by the Air Force, where he had trained as a jet pilot, to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. On completing his service in 1958, Fredkin was hired by J. C. R. Licklider to work at the research firm, Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN). After seeing the PDP-1 computer prototype at the Eastern Joint Computer Conference in Boston, in December 1959, Fredkin recommended that BBN purchase the very first PDP-1 to support research projects at BBN. The new hardware was initially delivered with no software whatsoever.

Edward Fredkin (born October 2, 1934) is a distinguished career professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and an early pioneer of digital physics.