Catching up With a Genius

Time-Traveling with Ken Thompson (Thanks to Claude)

I asked Twitter for recommendations on timeless papers from the field of computer science. Abhisek recommended Reflections on Trusting Trust — a paper authored by Ken Thompson in 1984.

For context, Ken Thompson is one of the founding fathers of modern computing. He co-created Unix and won Turing award (computing’s equivalent to the Nobel prize). Learning computer science from him is like learning chess from Kasparov.

It’s a short paper and I couldn’t really wrap my head around it in the first pass. Part of the trouble was that paper used C code to explain the idea and my knowledge of C programming is not good. I am a Java developer.

So I gave the paper to Claude and asked it to explain it in a way a Java programmer would find easy to understand. It did a decent job by translating Ken’s C examples to equivalent Java.

And after prodding it and cross questioning Claude a few more times, I got the hang of Ken’s point.

When your mind understands an idea, something wonderful happens. It broadcasts that new understanding to all the nook and crannies of the web of neurons to scout for other similar ideas which might be related. This is probably a mechanism in the brain to solidify the new understanding by attaching it to existing knowledge structures.

The moment Ken’s idea clicked in my head, my brain popped two related ideas on my thought screen. And Claude was more than happy to evaluate if my brain had made a meaningful connection.

With LLMs, it feels magical to have the ability to jump jurisdictional boundaries and make interdisciplinary connections. There’s no friction. It’s learning on steroids.

This makes all the great ideas of the world directly accessible to you. You don’t need a middle man or a science journalist to read a paper and explain it to you. You can now discuss directly with Ken Thompson’s of the world about their papers.

Recently Andrej Karpathy also echoed this idea of using LLMs to consume articles, books, and blogs.

Here’s the link to my conversation with Claude.