About Vic Grout
Futurist. Socialist. Vegan. Doomsayer.
Ethics/Futurology Professor.
Author of 'CONSCIOUS' https://vicgrout.net/the-book/
This probably shouldn’t be allowed to pass by without comment on this site.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25495315
Of course, on one level, this is great news for friends, family and the Computer Science community as a whole. It might also be seen as a small step towards righting a larger injustice (although it equally might not). On the other hand, a pardon is really a ‘let-off’ with a slapped wrist; “naughty boy but we forgive you”.
What it certainly doesn’t do is:
- Accept that the prosecution should never have been brought,
- Accept that the law was wrong and should never have been in force, or
- Offer anything for the tens of thousands of others, also victimised in the same way.
It’s doubtful that any of these will ever come to pass …
Leave a comment | tags: Alan Turing, Chemical castration, Computer Science, Enigma machine, Pardon, World War II | posted in Politics
T’is the season to be jolly … and silly. So here’s a seasonal and jolly silly example of why it’s hard to implement high-level languages efficiently. Liberties are taken with the hardware/software relationship in some parts of the analogy but, hey, it’s Christmas!
Let’s write an algorithm for pulling a Christmas cracker …
- Buy a box of crackers and bring home
- Take a cracker out of the box
- Get two people to hold an end each
- Pull in opposite directions
- Have fun with what’s inside
- Clear up the mess
That’s probably going to be enough detail for most people (and more than enough for some). However, if you’re the one that’s been entrusted with the initial purchase or the child told to do the clearing up, you might want a bit more to go on; what’s actually involved in that bit? And who are the ‘two people’ anyway? OK then, if needed, we can easily expand this a touch …
Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: Christmas, Christmas cracker, high-level language, low-level language, parallel processing, parallelism, pipelining, processor architecture, Xmas | posted in Algorithms, Computer Science, Computing, Hardware, Programming, Software
Can we continue to make computing devices smaller and/or faster? Can we do this without limit? If so, how? What’s the next generation?
Microchip designers use a wonderful armoury of terminology, most of it (deliberately, one suspects) impenetrable to outsiders. However, one of the – on the surface at least – least alarming, and certainly most charming, is the phrase “To the finish”. It’s an intriguing term and behind it is the spirit of an admirable intention. The only problem is no one really seems to know exactly what it means.
“To the finish”, in its broadest sense, is some mythological-technological future in which logic circuits have shrunk to such an extent that individual components are measured on the atomic scale. On one level, although in nominally different research fields, this is comparable to the “intelligent dust” predictions of the most enthusiastic Internet of Things proponents. Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: 14 nanometer, 16 nanometre, Atomic scale, Biocomputer, Brain, Chip design, Digital electronics, Human brain, Integrated circuit, Logic gate, Moore's law, Optical computing, Quantum computer, Technology | posted in Computer Science, Computing, Engineering, Hardware, Industry, Science
A somewhat more down-to-earth post, this one; an overview of, and a case study in, the wonderful revolution in Computing and Computer Science currently taking place in British schools. Adapted from a paper presented at the 4th World Conference on Learning, Teaching and Educational Leadership and published in the Elsevier ‘Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences’ journal.
The past few years have been challenging ones for Computing education in the UK. After decades of national neglect, largely overlooked, from the county that invented Computer Science, there has been a sudden impetus to reintroduce computational problem-solving into the school curriculum. Immediate obstacles include a generation of children with no CS background and a need for tens of thousands of new or retrained teachers. The Computing At School (CAS) movement has been instrumental in this quantum transition from an IT to Computing syllabus, as have the British Computer Society (BCS), leading UK university CS departments and a number of major international technology companies. This piece looks at the background to this position and the progress being made to address these challenges. It describes, as an example of many, the work of the BCS-funded Glyndŵr University ‘Turing Project’ in introducing Welsh high-school students and staff to high-level programming and ‘computational thinking’. The Turing Project uses an innovative combination of Lego NXT Mindstorm robots, Raspberry Pi computers and PicoBoard hardware together with the Robot C and Scratch programming platforms. Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: Alan Turing, BCS Academy, British Computer Society, Computer Science, Computing At School, Council of Professors and Heads of Computing, Glyndŵr University, Google, Lego NXT, North Wales, PicoBoard, Raspberry Pi, Robot C, Scratch programming | posted in Academia, Computer Science, Computing, Education, Hardware, Politics, Programming
Turing's Radiator 