Richard Hamming, The Man Who Made Computers Reliable

Richard Hamming got tired of a machine that could tell him something had gone wrong but not what. The relay computer at Bell Labs ran his jobs over the weekend, caught an error in its own self-checking circuits, dropped the work and moved on, and by Monday he had nothing. His response was to ask why a machine clever enough to notice an error could not also work out where it was. The answer he published in 1950 is the reason storage and communication are reliable. It is also, more specifically than most tributes admit, the single classical ingredient inside the Steane code, which is among the most studied error-correcting codes in quantum computing. Hamming’s classical construction did not merely inspire the quantum version. It is embedded in it. Turing Award 1968, awarded to Richard Hamming for numerical methods, automatic coding systems and error-detecting and error-correcting codes. He was also the first recipient of the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, in 1988, the award that carries his name. Key takeaways Hamming turned error detection into error correction. Existing schemes could tell you a message was corrupted. His 1950 code identifies which bit was wrong and repairs it without retransmission. The…