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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)
 

Computer Science Skills

From notes made by Phillip J. Windley of a talk given by Alan Kay: "Squeak is written in 230,000 lines of Smalltalk. They think it could be 20,000. There are 59,000 methods in 3.5Mb of object code, for about 59 bytes per method. There are about 5 million objects and it was implemented by ten people. The system is self-bootstrapping, so it's all in there. Learning how to do this ought to be part of computer science but regrettably it's not."
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R.I.P. Paul Newman

"We are such spendthrifts with our lives. The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out."
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A Visit from Rafael

Rafael Bordini will be visiting us in SoC next week. He will be giving a seminar entitled "A Verifiable Approach to Programming Multi-Agent Systems" and hopefully will spend the rest of the day chatting with ARG about possible avenues for joint work. The absract for his talk is as follows; "This talk will provide an overview of a particular approach to programming multi-agent systems and how we aim to do formal verification of systems programmed according to that approach. The talk covers some features of Jason, a Java-based interpreter for a variant of a logic-based agent-oriented programming language called AgentSpeak, and mentions various ongoing research strands related to it. The talk also gives a brief account of recent research aimed at developing a library of common features of agent programming languages so as to facilitate the use model-checking techniques for the verification of multi-agent systems written in such languages." I have met Rafael a couple of times and he is a thoroughly nice chap so I am quite looking forward to his visit. Anybody who can make it to the Wolfson Research Theatre on 27th February @ 12:30 should come along because they are in for a treat.
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Here’s to swimmin’ with bow legged women!

Yes I know that Quint said it but I think it fits and is a better send off than "we need a bigger boat". Anyhoo, as somebody who has always ranked Jaws as probably my favourite film and definitely one of the most technically perfect films ever I was saddened to learn that Roy Scheider has passed away. He was an actor from a bygone era of film and television, an older generation of actors who are sadly fading away now, who performed great roles in iconic films and cemented a position in the minds and hearts of the their fans. As well as Jaws I enjoyed, at various times in my life, his roles in the excellent films 2010, The French Connection, and Marathon Man, more mainstream movies like Blue Thunder and television series such as Seaquest D.S.V.. In common with many actors of his generation, I can't say that I was ever a fan, but I did, and still do, appreciate his performances in those films of his that I have watched. R. I. P.
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Posterous theme by Cory Watilo.
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