Strange Aeons
sesquipedalia verba
Simon Wells is an academic researching Argumentation Theory, Automated Reasoning, Intelligent Agents (IA) and MultiAgent Systems (MAS) all approached through a ludic lens.
He is particularly interested in how these tools can be usefully applied to critical literacy, security, gamification, and complex systems.
TwitterTowards the Simplest C "Hello World"
Saw this post, "Hello from a libc free world" and thought that you guys might find it interesting given that we are using C to implement emulations of simple historical hardware systems and translations of the machine code that would have run on it. The post starts with the question, why is a simple Hello World program, like the following, still 11Kb in size:
The remainder of the article delves into the intermediate assembly code generated by gcc and investigates how we can make Hello World as small as possible and actually avoid using the standar library when it is not needed.
In the same vein, this tutorial on creating "really teensy ELF executables for Linux" deals with producing the smallest ELF executables on Linux and demonstrates how hand-coding the assembly in the executable is still the best way to make sure that the only code in your executable is the code that you intended to be there.
Video Lecture: From NAND to Tetris
A video lecture that shows how to build a game-playing computer starting from first principles, e.g. hardware, and piling on the abstractions until you have a CPU, language processors, and a VM that can be used to write, compile, and run a Space Invaders game. If you are not sure whether it is worth investing the hour for the full lecture then try this 10 minute taster:
The full hour-long lecture, "From NAND to Tetris" is here:
As you begin the revision process ready for the exams you might find that taking a look at relevant video lectures like these will be a useful alternative to reading through your notes yet again.
Final Coursework
The requirements for coursework 5 have been posted. The core requirements for this project are more straightforward than the Manchester Baby simulator but there is scope for some very interesting extensions.
Manchester Baby Films
Two youtube films that I found which feature the Manchester Baby. The first is vintage footage from the BBC, reporting on the birth of the baby, which was unearthed for the fiftieth celebrations of the Baby and accompanied this article. This footage was helpfully reposted to youtube as well:
Additionally I found this footage of two of the inventors of the Baby, Tom Kilburn, who wrote the first ever program to run on the baby which was used to test the hardware, and Geoff Tootill:
