Tag: computer science
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Does “coding” have a future?
Today is, for me, the last working day of the year and I was able to finish with a small triumph – successfully solving several programming conundrums that have eaten into my time over a number of weeks. The technology involved – Python – is not one I have had much experience with, and only…
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Floating point, finally
What is “floating point”? How do you represent a number like in a compressed and useful way in binary? Any computer science student will be able to tell you that you use a “floating point” representation and, like me a couple of months ago, could probably move on to a hand-wavy explanation that you stored…
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Trusting the world of floating point
A lot of the everyday calculations we rely on depend on “floating point arithmetic” – in other words an approximation of accurrate mathematics and not actual accurate mathematics. For the last six weeks or so I have been working on bring floating point arithmetic to “Riscyforth” – my assembly-based implementation of Forth for Risc-V “single…
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This summer’s to-do list
It’s easier to produce this list than it is fo do them, but producing the list is also a means of holding myself to account: Complete the code to translate a string into an IEEE754 floating point number in Riscyforth: I am now pretty clear in my own head what the algorithmic steps to do…
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Mo Salah, penalties and artificial intelligence
Last night, as Leicester City played Liverpool, Mo Salah, current top scorer in the English Premiership, was taken down in the penalty box and then stepped up to take the (correctly-awarded) penalty. Salah hardly ever misses a penalty. It’s about as nailed on as you can get that he will score. Except last night he…
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A book recommendation
Lying in the bath this morning – relaxing into the Christmas holiday (despite the raging epidemic of omicron-variant Covid that is currently rampaging through London in an increasingly frightening manner), I had thoughts about several blog posts to write over the break, and this is the first… It’s a book recommendation: Ian Stewart‘s Concepts of…
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A great Christmas present?
I haven’t quite finished it yet – but I do want to strongly recommend Ananyo Bhattacharya’s “The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann” – not just because the author was very gracious when I, as some random on the Internet, tweeted him to tell him of a (very small) error…
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First year as a software engineer
Today marks the anniversary of me starting work as a software engineer. I love the job – despite some of the real challenges I’ve faced in a radical career change – and I do feel so very lucky to have got it in an exceptionally difficult time. Some of the changes are about how I…
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The problem with parallelisation
Just over 15 years ago a big change in general computing occurred – computer hardware more or less stopped getting faster. The previous three decades of ever-faster computer hardware had been supported by the ability to etch ever-smaller transistors on silicon. This, together with an ability to use bigger silicon wafers leads to what is…
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I love binary trees
A few years ago I was very proud of myself for managing to translate the original Pascal of the Reingold-Tilford algorithm into C/C++ and every since then I have had a fascination for drawing binary trees. The one drawn here was actually done “by hand” in Metapost – I realised only as I finished…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 