Sciber

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
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

Von Neumann's Computer Archicture
Von Neumann, J. (1945). “First draft of a report on the EDVAC". Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania. DOI: 10.5479/sil.538961.39088011475779.
John von Neumann and the “Report on the EDVAC” from An An Illustrated History of Computers.
Dyson, George. Turing's cathedral: the origins of the digital universe. Pantheon, 2012.

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.


Predicting Entropy Game Demo. Refining the Estimated Entropy of English by Shannon Game Simulation. Shannon's calculations of entropy of English.
Prediction and Entropy of Languages Wolfram Demo
An experimental estimation of the entropy of English, in 50 lines of Python code
Letter frequency in English
Word and Letter Frequency in English
Entropy of English. .
Text Mechanic - Text Manipulation Tools
Shuffle Letters and Narakeet.
Using Information Theory to Solve Wordle.
1952 – “Theseus” Maze-Solving Mouse @ cyberneticzoo.com

Labels: #Borges, #information, #Shannon