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.
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:
