Sciber

"Let us not imagine, however, that Colossus was a programmable, general-purpose computer in the modern sense. It could logically combine two data streams – one on tape, one generated from ring counters – and count the number of 1s encountered, and that was all. Much of the “programming” of Colossus was actually carried out on paper, with operators executing decision trees prepared by analysts." From, The Electronic Computers, Part 2: Colossus.

Labels: #Computers, #History

"Freeth and colleagues at University College London (UCL) believe they have finally cracked the puzzle using 3D computer modelling. They have recreated the entire front panel, and now hope to build a full-scale replica of the Antikythera using modern materials". News article at BBC News, full article at Scientific Reports.

Labels: #analogue, #Computers

The Lebombo Bone and Other Ancient Mathematical Objects
African Binary code

Turing Machine Simulator
Turing Machine Simulator 2
Turing Machine Simulator 3 (Java)

Some resources about the Abacus
The Abacus in Various Number Systems
Demo (The Chinese Abacus)
Mechanical Calculators
The Pascaline
The Antikythera Mechanism

The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project
NOVA: Ancient Computer

Babbage, Lovelace and the Analytical Engine
The Difference Engine
The Analytical Engine
9 Neat Facts About the World's First Computer Programmer, Ada Lovelace 
Ada Lovelace and the Analytical Engine
Helping Ada Lovelace with her Homework: Classroom Exercises from a Victorian Calculus Course





Cool implementation of Babbage's Difference Engine using LEGO! Photos, description of adder and carry propagation logic, mechanical issues, etc. at: By Andy Carol

Labels: #Computation, #Turing

Some pointers to the Jorge Luis Borges stories we discussed in class.

The Library of Babel
The Garden of Forking Paths
Interview with Jorge Luis Borges Borges' biography.

Information Basics
"The heart of his theory is a simple but very general model of communication: A transmitter encodes information into a signal, which is corrupted by noise and then decoded by the receiver. Despite its simplicity, Shannon’s model incorporates two key insights: isolating the information and noise sources from the communication system to be designed, and modeling both of these sources probabilistically. He imagined the information source generating one of many possible messages to communicate, each of which had a certain probability. The probabilistic noise added further randomness for the receiver to disentangle." Full article @ Quanta Magazine.


Entropy Applet
Letter frequency in English
Word and Letter Frequency in English
Entropy of English
Text Mechanic - Text Manipulation Tools
Shuffle Letters and Narakeet.
1952 – “Theseus” Maze-Solving Mouse @ cyberneticzoo.com

Labels: #Borges, #information, #Shannon

A useful resource to get information on the various topics in cybernetics and systems thinking is the Principia Cybernetica Project.

Labels: #Cybernetics, #History, #SystemsScience, #SystemsThinking