I am very grateful that I have the chance to read this paper which truly injected some inspiration into mine mindset. It is about GREAT WORK/RESEARCH and the elements or qualities to achieve it. It is not a technical paper but I will still try to review it with the recommended structure, as hamming told us sometimes we need to utilized the system.
Strengths
There are several places where it suddenly stroke me that I have always been making such stupid questions. How I wish I could have read this paper before! I only list those deeply touched me:
- I need courage to start research and sucecess will bring me more courage back.
- Working conditions I want are probably not always the best for me to work: I always spend too much to get myself prepared to work, which seems not necessary. It is a poor workman who blames his tools.
- Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest: I always wonder how to balance reading and coding and this seems like a good answer.
- Work hard: It is also what I heard on the semester starting ceremony.
- And also work on important problems: as an master I think I just need an advisor.
- Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well: I should learn to believe and doubt properly.
- Learn to work with the system: It is the same thing in teamworking.
- Be honest to yourself: Throw away alibis.
Weaknesses
As most of the contents are talks based on subject experience of the lecturer, we really should consider carefully in real world situations, though Hamming is a great man and most of his advice will probably be correct.
- "When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems." This sentence indicates that people might change subliminal when they success and become success. Then the problem comes that Hamming is successful and famous, how can I trust him that he speaks with a normal mindset rather than a famous or arrogant one.
- I think there could be gap between young master student and famous researchers. But sometimes Hamming forget to note that he may have a different perspective to this world and the process of research.
Can you do better?
It is really hard to do better research than Hamming, though I will try to keep this ambition in my mind. Just several tiny complaints for this great speech:
- There are too many stories and sometimes I got boring and simply skip. Of course I understand stories are important when delivering speech.
- The logic are not very clear. The topics seemed out of order and Hamming also pointed it himself. By the way, it occured to me that out-of-order execution is quite important for CPU performance.
Other Comments
It is really interesting to read such record for a lecture. Actually it is good for me to learn spoken English, especially those interesting examples and analogs. I also learned a lot from the question session: how to grab the very point and ask decent questions.