То есть Mary Tsingou занималась программированием — на этом самом
ламповом компьютере MANIAC I.
Есть целая статья 2008 года, посвящённая ей: Thierry Dauxois, «
Fermi, Pasta, Ulam and a mysterious lady ». Где можно найти скан блок-схемы 1955 года (на второй странице); кстати — строчка про \delta t там говорит, что «
stored … as a desired right shift »: деление на степень двойки это сдвиг двоичной записи вправо. И она была ещё жива — так что автор её нашёл и с ней поговорил(!).
Вообще, я очень люблю исторические тексты — за « штрихи » и за возможность увидеть авторов статей не только как имена, но и посмотрев на кусочки из их жизни. Пара цитат оттуда —
« …
But she quickly moved to T7 led by N. Metropolis for working on the first ever computer, the Maniac I, that no one could program. Together with Mary Hunt, she was therefore the first programmer to start exploratory work on it. She remembers it as prettyeasy because of the very limited possibilities of the computer: 1000 words.
They were working primarily on weapons but, in parallel, they studied other problems like programming chess or studying fundamental physics’ problems. Mary Tsingou mostly interacted with J. R. Pasta. They were the first ones to do actually graphics on the computer, when they considered a problem with an explosion and visualized it on an oscilloscope. … »
« …
However, she knew Fermi’s daughter Nella much better because Nella didn’t want to stay with her parents during
their visits to Los Alamos. The two young women slept in the
same dormitory, while Enrico and Laura Fermi were hosted
by their good friends Stan and Françoise Ulam….»
Их интересно читать и сопоставлять, подниматься по ссылкам… Так, вот одна из ссылок в статье про "
50 лет FPU" — текст
Николаса Метрополиса « The Age of Computing: A Personal Memoir »,
https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~pbeerli/classes/ISC-3313-notes/montecarlo/Daedalus1992Metropolis.pdf . Интересно, что он Mary Tsingou совсем не упоминает:
«...
Fermi and Teller were the first hackers. They would spend hours at the console of the MANIAC. Teller would spend his weekends at the laboratory playing with the machine. Fermi insisted on doing all the menial work himself, down to the least details, to the awed amazement of the professional programmers. He instinctively knew the right physical problems that the MANIAC could successfully handle.
His greatest success was the discovery of the strange behavior of
nonlinear systems arising from coupled nonlinear oscillators. The
MANIAC was a large enough machine to allow the programming of
potentials with cubic and even quartic terms. Together with John Pasta and Stanislaw Ulam, he programmed the evolution … ».
Зато Metropolis пишет про то, как они наткнулись на эффект:
«
By accident one day they let the program run long after the steady state had been reached. When they realized their oversight and came back to the computer room, they noticed that the system, after remaining in the steady state for a while, had then departed from it, and reverted to the initial distribution of energy (to within two percent). »
