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'Edward Forrest Moore' (November 23, 1925 in Baltimore, Maryland–June 14, 2003 in Madison, Wisconsin) was a professor of mathematics and computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1966 until he retired in 1985.
He was the first to use the type of Finite State Machine that is most commonly used today, the Moore FSM. With Claude Shannon he did seminal work on computability theory and making reliable circuits using less reliable relays. He also spent a great deal of his later years on a fruitless effort to solve the Four Color Theorem.
He received a B.S. in Chemistry from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1947 in Blacksburg, Montgomery co, Va. He received a degree in Ph.D. in Mathematics from Brown University in Jun 1950 in Providence, Providence co, RI. He worked at UIUC 1950-1952, then was a visiting lecturer at MIT and Harvard simultaneously in 1952-53. Then He worked at Bell Labs for about 10 years. After that, he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He married Elinor Constance Martin and had three children.
In a 1956 article in ''Scientific American'', he proposed "Artificial Living Plants," which would be floating factories that could create copies of themselves. They could be programmed to perform some function (extracting fresh water, harvesting minerals from seawater) for an investment that would be relatively small compared to the huge returns from the exponentially growing numbers of factories.

Contents

Articles

Publications

See also

References

Articles

★ "Machine models of self-reproduction," ''Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics'', volume 14, pages 17-33. The American Mathematical Society, 1962.

★ "Artificial Living Plants," ''Scientific American,'' (Oct 1956):118-126

★ "Gedanken-experiments on Sequential Machines," pp 129 – 153, Automata Studies, ''Annals of Mathematical Studies'', no. 34, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J., 1956

Publications

With Claude Shannon, before and during his time at Bell Labs, he coauthored "Gedanken-experiments on sequential machines", "Computability by Probabilistic Machines", "Machine Aid for Switching Circuit Design", and "Reliable Circuits Using Less Reliable Relays".
At Bell Labs he authored "Variable Length Binary Encodings", "The Shortest Path Through a Maze", "A simplified universal turing machine", and "Complete Relay Decoding Networks".

See also

★ artificial life

★ Homer Jacobson

★ Moore neighborhood

★ Moore graph

References

★ Memorial Resolution of the Faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the Death of Professor Edward F. Moore (PDF file)