Strange Aeons

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Simon Wells
Simon Wells

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.

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2011 (12)
2010 (27)
2009 (3)
 

Alan Turing and the Ace computer

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To get you in the mood for thinking about the development and history of computing, here is an article from the BBC about Alan Turing, an important figure in the development of both early computer hardware and computational science, and the ACE computer, the Automatic Computing Engine.
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The Editor of "Real Programmers"

The always excellent xkcd has this to say on the subject of editor choice and its relationship to real programmers:
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It seemed apropo given the last post.
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CMNA 9 Presentation on "Argument Blogging"

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As promised here are the slides from my Argument Blogging presentation at CMNA 9 in Pasadena, California.
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Lets Go Exploring

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I found this strip sitting on my hard drive and wanted to share it. I honestly think that you have to be a little bit dead inside to not love Calvin & Hobbes.
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Telly-On-The-Go With N810 Media Encoding

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After my rail trip earlier this week where I had free, but so slow as to be unusable, WiFi I resolved to load some media onto my N810 to help pass the time on future journeys. Early experiments showed that the N810 can play the average xvid avi downloaded from your favourite torrent site. However it didn't necessarily play them well. Firstly, you need to install mplayer which gets better performance out of the hardware than the stock media player. Then, so long as the scene isn't high-motion you can watch your tv show, or movie, or whatever. To get good performance though really needs a re-encode, especially to play media downloaded from iplayer (maybe via my earlier technique for timeshifting British TV) which is unwatchable. The best solution that I have found is tablet-encode which provides mencoder profiles for the N810 and is command-line based so is ripe for scripting. Usage is simple, as all good software should be:
tablet-encode tablet-encode --help tablet-encode --preset list tablet-encode input.avi output.avi tablet-encode --list file1.avi file2.avi file3.avi tablet-encode --preset best input.avi output.avi tablet-encode dvd: film.avi tablet-encode --preset best dvd://1 dvd://2 dvd://3 media/ tablet-encode --gui input.avi output.avi
Tablet-encode can be downloaded from Maemo.org.
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LittleBigLife

And you guys thought that programming this in C was tough ;) Here we have a version of Conway's Game of Life implemented in LittleBigPlanet:

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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.

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Manchester Baby Screencast

To match the Game of Life screencast we also have a really nice example of a Manchester Baby simulator running a nice example program:

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Conway's Game of Life Screencast

This is the only coursework 2 screencast that I received for the gallery so it gets a front page post all to itself:

This project shows an extension to the basic requirements of the coursework, which was to develop a one dimensional CA. In this case we have a two dimensional CA that implements Conway's Game of Life rules.

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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:

 

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Posterous theme by Cory Watilo.
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