John von Neumann

John von Neumann

A Hungarian-American mathematician whose 1945 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC described the stored-program architecture, with instructions and data held in the same memory, that almost every computer since has followed. He also co-founded game theory with Oskar Morgenstern in 1944, worked on the Manhattan Project, and in his final years developed the theory of self-reproducing cellular automata, asking what minimum machinery a system needs to copy itself. Each of these strands, computation, strategic reasoning under uncertainty, and self-replication, reappears in AI. (See also: Alan Turing, Algorithm, Artificial intelligence (AI))