Imagine wandering through an exhibition of artistic textiles and stumbling across a Navajo rug that looked for all the world like an Intel CPU. Well, that's exactly what happened to computer historian Ken Shirriff as he recently sauntered through the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
Could this be a fabulously improbable case of art unintentionally imitating life? As Shirriff observes, the similarity between high level integrated circuit design and Navajo designs had been noted since the 1960s.
