Philip Emeagwali – Genius or Crook?
There’s been much news going on about the so called great Nigerian scientist “Philip Emeagwali” but unfortunately, most of them are untrue. Emeagwali has been virtually worshipped buy Nigerians and others around the world based on false information which has led to his face appearing on a postage stamp and him being voted the 35th greatest African of all time by the “New Africa Magazine”.

This thread is aimed correcting most of these untrue claims by Emeagwali.

Philip Emeagwali not Dr. Philip Emeagwali
Firstly, Emeagwali has been wrongfully quoted by newspapers and even on his site as being a “Dr.” But this is an actual fallacy because he does not have a PhD, though he enrolled for a PhD program at the University of Michigan he did not get the degree because he failed the qualification examination twice but still he seems parades himself around as a “Dr.”.

Emeagwali did not win the Nobel Prize
Emeagwali has not in any way won the Nobel Prize nor its equivalent as reported by many and on his self promoting website, the only prize ever won by Emeagwali is the Gordon bell prize in 1989 worth $1,000 which he and his Mobil team won for their application of the Connection Machine – 2 supercomputer in oil-reservoir modelling.

Emeagwali did not built the fastest computer of 1989
The fastest computer of 1986 is the FSU which ran at 10.3GFLOPS while the connection machine which Emeagwali wrote a program to on for which he and his team won the Gordon Bell prize in prize/performance ratio, ran at 3.1GFLOPS, this machine was designed by Danny Hills and built by Thinking Machines Corporation and not by Philip Emeagwali as he wrongfully claims on his website and in press interviews.

Emeagwali is not the father of the internet.
Emeagwali claims that he rearranged the 65,536 processors of the Connection Machine so that they were arranged in a 3-dimentional Hypercube network and that his invention was the technology that spawned the internet. This is again another false claim by Philip Emeagwali because the connection machine was originally designed with a Hypercube Network and it was long known arrangement. Also, there is nothing liking Emeagwali with ARPA, DOD or any other research organization that was connected with the birth of the internet.

Emeagwali does not have any patents or inventions.
Emeagwali has been credited with so many inventions, most of them hilarious and he also claims to have as much as 30 patents and 50 patent applications but a search on USPTO which has an online database of patents since 1976 shows the true number to be zero. The only time Emeagwali’s name has appeared in any scientific journal of any kind is when he and his Mobil team won the Gordon Bell Prize in 1989.

There are many more baseless rumours flying around Nigeria which are completely baseless, dumb and humorous but are surprisingly widely believed. I’ll try to list some of them here. They are:

Emeagwali created windows but Bill Gates Stole his invention.
There is an “Emeagwali street” somewhere in the US.
Emeagwali is the most booked man for an appointment in the World.
Emeagwali is currently creating a teleportation machine.
Emeagwali wrote an equation to show how sperm swims in semen.
Emeagwali is the brain behind Microsoft.
www.emeagwali.com is the oldest website on the internet.


We Nigerians have to stop kidding ourselves over a self pompous and highly over exaggerated man who has accomplished close to nothing but writes a website about himself and fills it up with lies. While the armature media we have in this country swallows everything they hear without scrutiny.

Sources:
http://magazine.biafranigeriaworld.com/cezeilo/2003nov09.html
http://www33.brinkster.com/iiiii/inventions/emeag.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Emeagwali
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Philip_Emeagwali
http://emeagwali.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine

Nairaland Members I'm awaiting your replies to this.

is he into showbiz?

Actually i've also read very well about him before, but in my own opinion, He is somebody i look up to, b'cos we are in the same field {Computer Science}, but did u read much about him, the problem the Whites have with him is simply because he is not a White man that's why he is not celebrated like the Isaac Newtons,Bill Gates,Gallileos,Avogradros etc, out of all the subjects and courses in our books,i mean mostly in all field have u ever come across a black man's name? There are inventions from the black race but they throw their names to the gutter!!!!!!!!!!!!All they do is to try to bring down his name simply because he is better than then, Tell me how can a 19 year boy become a University Professor, How?? when did he even start school What about his masters What about his Ph.D?
So my brother it's all White man tactics to tell we blacks that we can never reach them, Even if u discover anything today they will try to bring u down with all sort of arrangeeeeees, Don't mind anything u read falsely about him Why couldn't they program the connection machine before he did, Do you even know that he created a program that was able to solve a mathematical problem that could not be solved 300 years back, Thanx for the internet the truth are all around for you to find out, from codemasta, seun2talk@yahoo.com.
www.lautech.edu.ng

@ codemasta. Pls don't join in this hype. There's no racism in science. It's either you have stuff or not. I visited Philip's website. To me ,is nothing more than a family album. Where are the programs or products he has created?. The guy just love publicity. He is just another Nigerian in the US struggling for his daily bread.

the man is worse than a crook. read everything here:

http://magazine.biafranigeriaworld.com/cezeilo/2003nov09.html

and here:

http://www33.brinkster.com/iiiii/inventions/emeag.html

na wa ooo

Seee the Igbo woman on against Igboman.
Did he do anything?, Did he accomplish anything?

If his cannot celebrate him, why will the whites do?


I do not think a white man will take out time to declay him as false the way Chioma did.

Philip is a great man.

?

so because he is igbo a fellow igbo should not expose his fraud?

abegi!

the man is a deceitful, lying egotistic sham.

Ex Inferis:

so because he is igbo a fellow igbo should not expose his fraud?

abegi!

the man is a deceitful, lying egotistic sham.

That is typical of the Igbos.

Since nobody said anything about him, he decided to blow his trumpet and probably overdid it.
Why is it that you guys are complaining?

May be if you had praised his 'little' achievement he would have been satisfied.

Look at how they are still stiffling Oyibos GAGUT
Nobody mentions him in the western media
And at home . . .
If he begins to blow his trumpet, somebody from Kogi will come out and say he is a liar and egoistic.
If we do not honour our own, noone will honour them for us.

@ agaba123. do you know that we have a Nigerian auto designer in General Motors, USA? this guy designed the environmentally friendly electric car ,VOLT, for GM. now , that's one Nigerian I am proud of.
show me what Philip has done. softwares, programs, products,  give us FACTS!

flyuche:

@ agaba123. do you know that we have a Nigerian auto designer in General Motors, USA? this guy designed the environmentally friendly electric car ,VOLT, for GM. now , that's one Nigerian I am proud of.
show me what Philip has done. softwares, programs, products, give us FACTS!

Thats good news to me.

Thanks for telling me

Wowie! I'm appalled that people believe all that rubbish. I had an inkling he was over celebrated when I was in JSS II and cowbell paraded him as an intellectual great. I wondered, 'if he was so great, why didn't I hear of him or read about him through any foreign media?' And as someone put it, 'there's little racism in knowledge, you either merit it or you don't' I even thought the only thing he was credited for was designing the fastest computer at one time and I still was cynical. Now you go ahead to mention all these hilarious claims and I'm beginning to wonder if the guy is a victim of ID theft or he truly believes we are soooooo dumb in Nigeria. But then, if people believe in killer numbers and deadly radiation emitting phones, who would blame him from reeling from an unintellectual sea of mugus. After all the one-eyed man rule in a blind society.

Father of the internet, chaii!!

I'll see the site before I believe this!

O ga o! Someone tell this fraud thing is untrue cos I've always been proud of him.

this issue has been under debate in nl for over 2 years now.why bringing it up here again?

zukkymike:

this issue has been under debate in nl for over 2 years now.why bringing it up here again? 

because the megalomaniac is yet to take his fraudulent website down. as long as he is still there promoting his version of tech history, we shall always be here to put him down.

Tell em Ex.

Time Magazine is regarded as the world's number 1 news magazine. This is a link to an article they wrote on him.Are we then to believe that Time didnt do its home work properly or they are lying?

Note the 2nd to last paragraph where it says:

"The discovery earned him the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers' Gordon Bell Prize in 1989, considered the Nobel Prize of computing, and he was later hailed as one of the fathers of the Internet. "

http://www.time.com/time/2007/blackhistmth/bios/04.html

tundecraig:

Time Magazine is regarded as the world's number 1 news magazine. This is a link to an article they wrote on him.Are we then to believe that Time didnt do its home work properly or they are lying?

Note the 2nd to last paragraph where it says:

"The discovery earned him the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers' Gordon Bell Prize in 1989, considered the Nobel Prize of computing, and he was later hailed as one of the fathers of the Internet. "

http://www.time.com/time/2007/blackhistmth/bios/04.html

obviously you don't read Time magazine, else a cursory glance on the Letters section of almost each issue will point out corrections and addendums to you. Time is prone to inaccuracies such as the one of March 27, 2008 article “The Clean Energy Scam" replete with inaccuracies regarding global food shortage. or how about Josh Tyrangiel's May 2002 article on Iraq and Saddam in which the author plainly claims Iraq's nuclear rogram "is in full swing" despite the IAEA and intelligence experts saying otherwiose. in the end the experts and IAEA were vindicated as it turned out Iraq had neither a bomb nor a nuke program. clearly this is worse than inaccuracy; this is plain falsehood (may we ask Josh Tyrangiel where he got his info?) and Time didnt even put out an apology. He was even rewarded by the  dubious  Stengel.

and then theres that infamous and misstatements-riddled Joe Klein article of  Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2007 which earned Klein and Time itself outright condemnation within and without the journalism industry.

so don't take everthing you read as gospel, particularly since most of Time's claims regarding Phillip came from his egomania-radiating website.

infact, the nobel-equivalent of computing awards is the Turin Award and not the George-whatever with a palty $1000 tag that Phillip won. if he had won the Turing award then perhaps he will have a righteous claim to fame.

That article was written over a year ago. At what point do we expect a correction from Time Magazine to its article on Dr Emeagwali? Its certainly not in the new edition that came out today Friday October 10th.

tundecraig:

That article was written over a year ago. At what point do we expect a correction from Time Magazine to its article on Dr Emeagwali? Its certainly not in the new edition that came out today Friday October 10th.

you either missed my point or my point missed you.

Time makes errors, same as everyone else, and they dont always make corrections. and stories come from sources sometimes removed from the normal reporting bureaus. whoever wrote that article is among the Joe Kleins and tyrangiels and jeff koinanges of this sordid little world.

just because Time said it doesnt mean its so. remember december 1999 and the supposed Millennium Bug that was supposed to wipe out all computer data and Mankind as well and which Bill gates put to good use to sell Win2K? how did time report it? AS A DOOMSDAY SCENARIO, THATS HOW!!

and guess what, we are still here.

And sometime in 1996 or thereabouts there was a grossly exaggerated article on the late Sani Abacha, and the info from that article came from a lot of disgruntled nigerians with axes to grind.

seeing my point? the article on philip in question took a lot of "material" from Emegwali himself and didnt do serious fact checks else Time wont be so ignorant of the standing of the Turin award in the scientific/computing community, or the small role philip played in utilizing parallel computing in applications which has nothing to do with the invention of the internet. check any online, archival resource as well as Darpa/Arpanet history and see if Emegwali's name featured there.

nigerian Bill gates indeed.

While there was mass hysteria concerning Y2K, rememeber there was also mass preparation. The vast majority of people with computers were prepared and corrected what needed to be done.
The chaos was largely prevented, because every sensitive agency ( traffic lights, the military, power supply, etc) had made all the neccessry changes long before Jan 1 2000.If they had not, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN CHAOS, and many machines would have ceased to work or worked in the wrong way.

While Dr Emeagwali may not be the greatest computer scientist of our time, he is certainly an eminent scientist who has made achievements that are worthy of note.

Please also note that while the IQ of a genius starts at 160, Dr Emeagwali's IQ is 190. Bill Gates has an IQ score of 160.
The link below is my source for this.
( http://www.kids-iq-tests.com/famous-people.html)

As far as I know, that article by Time was and is correct.

tundecraig:

While there was mass hysteria concerning Y2K, rememeber there was also mass preparation. The vast majority of people with computers were prepared and corrected what needed to be done.
The chaos was largely prevented, because every sensitive agency ( traffic lights, the military, power supply, etc) had made all the neccessry changes long before Jan 1 2000.If they had not, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN CHAOS, and many machines would have ceased to work or worked in the wrong way.

While Dr Emeagwali may not be the greatest computer scientist of our time, he is certainly an eminent scientist who has made achievements that are worthy of note.

Please also note that while the IQ of a genius starts at 160, Dr Emeagwali's IQ is 190. Bill Gates has an IQ score of 160.
The link below is my source for this.
( http://www.kids-iq-tests.com/famous-people.html)

As far as I know, that article by Time was and is correct.

your ignorance is beyond salvage. i threw a gauntlet at you that challenges you to come up with ANY material that asserts philip's role in inventing the inernet besides his website and that Time article and you are yet to provide that crucial info. and you still cling to that false notion that Time was right and philip invented saupercomputing and the internet. funny, no computing journal made that claim.

and he didnt win the computing equivalent of the Nobel prize (the Turing award). that says a lot about his accomplishment.

give credit where its due; lets give emegwali credit for utilizing parallel computing to model oil reservoirs, which hadnt been done before, but lets not give him credit for inventing the internet because he didnt. the machines he use were invened by others, the internet he used to network his parallel processors was also in existence when he performed his feat.

period.

and since when did IQ mean anyting beyond a quantity analysis of intelligence? IQ dioesnt mean genuis in inventions and innovations? it simply weighs intellectual potential. otherwise Jolene Blaylock or Chris Langan with an IQ of 200 will have invened quantum computing or a cure for AIDS or a longer lasting lightbulb or something.

Marilyn vos Savant had a high IQ, Gary Kasparov (the chess genuis) has an IQ of 190 (but he isnt smart enough to keep himself from jail, apparently) but they invented nothing.

as for the Y2K bug, it seems you yourself bought into the hogwash. what preparations were made? people using winows 98 still use windows 98 and their machines didnt end up in fiery millennial holocaust. it was all a ruse to sell windows 2000 which bill gates told us that if we didnt buy we'd get stuck in planes, elevators etc.

those who didnt buy it are still here. what chaos are you talking about?

my guy, open your eyes, Time was not written by the scientific community nor by philips' peers, and nowhere in the history of the internet is his name worthy of mention beyond APPLYING the internet, as it was then, in SUPERCOMPUTING APPLICATION. nothing more.

how do you explain his claim of having over 50 patents when the US patent office has no single entry by philip emegwali? (ou can check for yourself here : www.uspto.gov)



but if you maintain that seemingly unshakeable insistence that philip derserves credit for the internet, then god help you.

he is not a doctor.

Well, this is a nice and interesting topic, but funny enough i can be on any side and still give facts for my posts.
Actually, the man has some controversial history and that is so because of various writters and views.
In the light of the above, it is very easy to get the facts, for one i always tell anyone that the internet has more falsehood than truth in it, and so the fact that a website contains some information does not necessarily mean it is true. I can create a website and feed it with whatever information i like.

even at that, there are sites which are official sites, and they contain authentic information,
Well, i dont want to be involved in a debate with anyone, but i find some flaws almost in every posts in this thread concerning Philip Emeagwali.

Starting with the poster, Philip Emeagwali won the Gordon Bell prize alone in the year he won it. He was the only individual to win the Gordon Bell Prize alone while eight researchers from MIT shared the other Gordon Bell Prize. The fact is that an 8-man MIT team tied with only one-man. Check the Gordon site for details.

The word "fastest computer" can be used in a relative sense and could sometimes be a confusing term. For those who care, check out facts about fastest supercomputers ever built and you will see that most times it depends on the purpose of the comp and who the criterias used for assessment.

As far as I'm aware, he's never designed or built a computer in his life, and there is no claim to that even in his website. The Gordon Bell prize he won was for a numerical achievement; the highest number of floating point operations per second achieved when using the computer for a particular application domain. In other words, at the time he won the award, he had his computer cranking over more numbers per second for doing geophysical simulations than anyone else had in the past. This was not an influencial project because there was no published papers for this research.

The Gordon bell's prize can be viewed as a "supercomputing's Nobel Prize". The Gordon Bell prize has $5,000 while the Turing has $25,000 while the Nobel Prize has one million dollars. The Field's Medal is called the Nobel Prize of mathematics yet it has zero financial reward. So the cash rewards doesn't matter.

The Turing Award is not a supercomputing award. For the record, the Gordon Bell prize is supercomputing's top prize and by default the Nobel Prize of supercomputing. The IEEE Gordon Bell Prize-winning works are published in IEEE publications and publicly defended at the annual Supercomputing conference which draws 10,000 attendees. The Turing Award is a private closed-door selection process.
Both awards are of different classes, has a link with ACM and the Turing awards also boasts of the equivalent nobel in computing.

His biography [emeagwali.info] claimed "41 discoveries" while  secondary sources claimed " patents."  The fact remains that he filed patents has never been disputed by any sources even the USPTO.

You have submitted 41 inventions to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office concerning seven technologies. Can you give us expanded details?

Philip Emeagwali - Inventors are reluctant to provided expanded details of their inventions until they receive full patent protection. The reason is that the Patent and Trademark Office can deny patents to inventors that publicly provided details of their invention. More on the inventors site

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa111097a.htm


Philip Emeagwali was never a "father of the Internet" and made no significant contributions to the Internet's development. Philip Emeagwali did not invent the Internet. Pls don't forget that there are myths that about Tim Berners-Lee, and Al Gore also inventing the internet. No one invented the internet. Contributors includes

Leonard Kleinrock
J.C.R. Licklider 
Larry G. Roberts .
Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf
Radia Perlman

There is a difference between the web and the internet, someone is credited for inventing the car but wheels were already in existence even before the car was dreamed of, and so it goes. The web is the most integral part of the internet. The Time magazine, CNN, BBC and white house could not all have been wrong. They acknowledge his contributions to the internet.

If he is hailed as one of the fathers of the internet? The question i often ask is who are those hailing him? If the professionals are those hailing him then everyone should keep his mouth shut, otherwise the reverse also becomes true.

Nevertheless, based on the Bell Prize, he has since received numerous further awards, ranging from one from the World Bank-IMF Africa Club to being voted the "35th-greatest African of all time" in a survey by New African magazine. He has a number of awards.

His achievements were quoted in a speech by Bill Clinton as an example of what Nigerians could achieve when given the opportunity. The President of the United States as you know has computer scientists review the transcript of his televised speech for technical accuracy.

There are a dozen University of Michigan publications hailed Emeagwali as a genius whom the university officials spent three years courting. In the citiation below, the university's flagship publication called "Michigan Today" (February 1991) devoted a special issue on his work. The latter issue on Emeagwali was mailed to the university's 400,000 alumni.

Americans promotes theirs, the Britons do the same and sometimes i always come to realize that there is so much hype by western media of their nationals, many of which are untrue and we are forced to believe such. If nobody hypes Philip, his records speakes for himself and he has managed to survived in a stiffed-neked American society, who can sometimes view blacks as non-achievers.
Most of the websites serves as distractions and this applies to many others, if u read some posts about Bill gates, Steve Jobs, Linux Tolvards and others u think they not accomplished anything in this world. I know you would understand better.

SOURCES: Documents from the IEEE, Association for Computing Machinery, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, The White House, seven universities (including the University of Michigan), dozens of books in Amazon.com.

Pls some persons are used to quoting from websites published by anonymous authors. Confirm such claims first.
If the university of michigan says he was a genius, i would not argue.

I believe everyone is a genuis.

Corrections are welcomed.

first, the gordon bell award is the nobel prize of supercomputing, but not of overall computing which is the turing award. using your argument emegwali is a genuis in supercomputing, which is a subset of computing, but that does not invariably mean he invented the internet as claimed by the man himself and his ass kissers.

the internet is not all about supercomputing; various interconnected nodes form the backbone of the net while supercomputing these days plays a more significant role in weather modelling, biochemistry, complex simulations, intelligence analysis etc. its interesting the fastest supercomputer is in use by the NSA.

emegwali made his mark by only APPLYING supercomputing to attain high gflops in an APPLICATION.

what does that have to do with the internet? parallel processing existed long before philip, and the highest demonstrable gflops outside applications was not achieved by him anyway. in anycase he shared his feat with others and the noisse about his achievement was because he is black and only few expected it from a nigerian.

you yourself said the world wide web is an integral part of the internet. well, shouldnt berners-lee as its founder be celebrated, as its financier al gore?

kindly tell us one, just one, celebrated british or american scientist the world knows as a fraud but who continues being celebrated by his people.

while mulling that, keep in mind that noone denies him the credit of achieving jigh gflops in application, he was a genuis at that.

but that feat does not translate into being the internet's father.

speaking of clinton's exuberance and your statement aides pre-check speeches for technical and factual accuracy, where were you when george w. bush made the famous gaffe that 'Nigeria is an important CONTINENT'!!

or are you telling us his aides dont know the difference between countty and continent, or nigeria and africa?

in summary, philip emegwali is an egomaniac who clouds the issue rather than let the facts speak for themselves. he is a one-time genuis, but a fraud nonetheless.

if he's such a genuis how come he hasnt invented something else or improved the net or supercomputing ever since? why does he not feature in scientific journals or publish research and theories?

by the way its false that the USPO doesnt reveal patents until when granted; the moment you file your application and its received as pending after review it shows up in the database for all to see.

this ensures avoidance of duplicate filings.

so in essence, this guy had a one off fame for a school project he did with his team way back , and he's been living in euphoria since then.? how come the other members of that team are just keeping mute?

I hope every thread will not turn out to be a D and E thread.

Most of the issues u raised were already thrashed in my earlier post.

When he won the award, he had his computer cranking over more numbers per second for doing geophysical simulations than anyone else had in the past.

Supercomputing is not a "narrow field." Historically, the supercomputer of today is the computer of tomorrow. The supercomputer is to the computer what the heavy champion is to boxing. The latter may not be pound-for-pound the best fighter, but punch-for-punch he is the toughest.

It simply means that applications in super computers will most likely end up in desktops some day, do u admit to the fact that the so called supercomps of the 2nd generation is equivalent to ur system?

My question is can the White House, CNN, BBC, Inventors directory Time Mag, and even Apple Corp all be wrong. They all claim he made a contribution.
Supercomputiing and the Internet are two different ball games but depending on how u look at it they can still share some similarities.

My dear friend let's not mix up political issues with scientific ones. The perceptive of Bush's statement is a different issue from this one and your statement only goes to show that the western world blackmails the black continent. My cousin once told me of watching programs in US TVs that potrays blacks as people living on trees.

I can give u dozens of individuals that many persons thought of as achieving the first feat but that would not really help here.

Santos who achieved the first flight in the world and is promoted by the brazilians but the American press promotes the Wright Brothers.

You think Thomas Edison invented the Light bulb? Sorry he was not. Joseph Swan did but the  American press continues to promote Edisson even though the US court ruled in favor of Joseph Swan.

Now tell me, how will all these notions be corrected?

Emegwali achieved a feat, that was not achieved until he did.Did you did was considered at that time to be one of the 20 national grand challenges in science and engineering at that time?

It is very easy to say, his achievement has no impact, fine but how many of us can achieve that feat, why didn't the Americans did it even though they owned the Connection Machine.

How many persons have the savvy to go though a 1000 pages of complex maths.

Ex, how about ur FPS game developement, How's is it going? We would want u to give us a feat that has not been achieved.
I ve been much involved in on some research involving quantum computing. It is a completely abstract science invloving abstract maths and maybe with abstract applications. I know what i'm currently going through and if i achieve something at the end of the tunnel. i hope to be celebrated.
Thx

you asked a lot of questions, but second reading made them out as rhetorics. like i said, sure philip made an achievement and yes supercomputing is a big deal to certain fields of endeavour, but the internet you and i use to constantly argue about arcane things has precious little to do with emegwali.

thats the point of us dissenters. no one is begrudging the silly little man his recognition for what he did, but dude lets not make mountains out of molehills, how many scientists have gaudy websites emblazoned with snippets and articles and references glorifying a decades-old achivement? pjilip is being too loud about his feat, and some poor folks are buying into the fiction.

you keep insisting BBC, Time and whoever cant be wrong; the scientific community asserts philip's work is not what its made out to be, and you know what? i tend to believe the scientific community.

however, you hold on to your point of view which is completely muddled-i mean, i cant decide what side of the fence you are on, on one hand you say he didnt invent the internet and supercomputing has little to do with the net, on the other you seem to say otherwise.

also, i find your remark that the whites blackmail the blacks as a tad naive. on what grounds? in the colonial times when empire-building was in fashion and slavery wasnt a disease i'll say YES. now, not so much. Africa isnt that much a strategic big deal in the grand scheme of things economically and politically. we are more like a burden on the whiteman's shoulders (although their past misdeeds can account for most of that fact).

i digress. i totally agree philip was memorable for what he did, but lets keep it focused on what he did rather than on what he didnt.

as for the game, its on hold currently. im suffering from feature creep and its becoming bloated and unwieldy. its currently running at a rubbish 14.7 frames per second beacuse of the textures which have to be scaled down. also the lightmaps are making nonsense of my puny graphics card. im having issues too with fpi scripting, thinking of going Dark basic. will finish a two-level playable demo and link you pending on when i get a gaming rig. hunt in the games thread for some screenshots (far back as 3 or four months ago).

cheers.

MY point is,
He achieved a feat and he's viewed as a genuis.
No one invented the internet.
Blacks should appreciate their fellows and even promote them rightly.

point of correction. it was a collective feat.

@fly, read tru earlier posts, , time has overtaken ur post.