Richard M. Friedberg (born October 8, 1935) is a theoretical physicist who has contributed to a wide variety of problems in mathematics and physics.
Friedberg’s initial words from 1958 “Machines would be more useful if they could learn to perform tasks for which they were not given precise methods” are the coin of the realm in computational intelligence.
Entire disciplines of evolutionary computation are devoted to problems in automatic programming.
He finished the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition in 1956 in the top five competitors.
In 1944 Emil Post asked whether intermediate degrees exist on a certain interval of the Turing scale.