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.
TwitterHomebrew Turing Machine
Saw this today, it is not quite the Manchester Baby, but the fundamental ideas are the same. Mike Davey created this homebrewed implementation of a Turing Machine (via IEEE Spectrum Article "DIY Turing Machine"):
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.
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:
Academic Earth - Machine Structure Lectures
Academic Earth, the academic video lecture site has a series of lectures by David Culler of Berkeley on Machine Structures. Described thus:
The internal organization and operation of digital computers. Machine architecture, support for high-level languages (logic, arithmetic, instruction sequencing) and operating systems (I/O, interrupts, memory management, process switching). Elements of computer logic design. Tradeoffs involved in fundamental architectural design decisions.Lectures 5, on instruction set architecture, and 8, on Technology and Digital Abstraction, in particular look relevant to this module and lecture 12 is probably just interesting. To get you started here is the introductory lecture in the series:
