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International Business Machines Corporation Thomas J. Watson Research Center
P.O. Box 218
Yorktown Heights, New York 10598
914/WG 53000

January 9, 1969

Professor Joshua Lederberg
Department of Genetics

Stanford University School of Medicine
Stanford Medical Center

300 Pasteur Drive

Palo Alto, California 94304

Dear Professor Lederberg:

Thank you very much for your note, I had not been aware of your
column in The Washington Post until you sent me the copy, I am sending you,
in a separate envelope, a reprint of the IEEE Spectrum paper as well as some
of my other papers, also papers by some of my colleagues, As far as my own
papers go, you will find that they probably do not add a great deal to the basic
epistemology question beyond what you have already read in the IEEE Spectrum

paper,

As far as work outside this laboratory goes, there is relatively little,
There is a sequence of papers by Hans J, Bremermann, Department of
Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, California, as follows:

"Quantitative Aspects of Goal-Seeking Self-Organizing Systems,'' Progress in
Theoretical Biology, Vol. 1, pp. 59-77.

"Quantum Noise and Information,'' Proc, of Fifth Berkeley Symposium on
Mathematical Statistics and Probability, December 1965,

‘Limits on Data Processing Arising from Quantum Theory,'! Self Organizing
Systems Proceedings, Spartan Books, pp, 93-99, 1962 (M,C, Yovits, G, T.
Jacobi, G. D, Goldstein, eds, )

I agree with Bremermann about the finiteness of memory available in the
universe, but would disagree with the exact details of his equations, D, van
Dantzig, ina paper, "Is 101019 « Finite Number ?'! Dialectica, Vol. 9 (1956),
pp. 273-277, presented an early mathematician!s view of the problems involved
in very large computations, Finally, you might be interested in the views
January 9, 1969

expressed by Hao Wang, of the Rockefeller University, who gave us a talk in
this laboratory a year or so ago, intended as a reply to my IEEE Spectrum
paper, Iam including a copy of that talk with this note,

I*ll be visiting Berkeley on February 4, and our own San Jose Research
Laboratory probably on February 3 and February 5, If you are not too busy
that week, perhaps I can stop off in your laboratory for a second and make your
personal acquaintance, Alternatively, and preferably, it would be delightful
to have you visit our laboratory sometime and give a talk, Perhaps you could
squeeze that in on your next visit east. We would be delighted to pay an
honorarium and whatever share of your expenses would be reasonable to
attribute to us,

We have crossed tracks on at least two occasions before; a few years
ago, when Henderson Cole interacted with you, I was in the background and
involved in at least one phone conversation with you, Furthermore, if I
remember correctly, you preceded me in the Stuyvesant High School extra-
curricular math department activities by a few years, Naturally, that's a one-
way connection and you would be unlikely to be aware of it,

Sincerely yours,

la bond

Rolf’Landauer

RL:mm