Happy holidays to everyone! Hopefully the eggnog has been flowing freely and if you’re in the Northeast you’ve been enjoying the unusually warm weather. I’d been planning to post the usual link roundup but changed my mind. I ended up seeing The Imitation Game last night and it inspired me to do something different. The movie is definitely worth seeing and if you work in technology it illuminates a connection to a shared past that most of us don’t often think about. So continuing in this theme, here are four links that’ll help explain how the actual sausage gets made.
Church–Turing thesis
This is the big one. Developed independently by Church and Turing, and eventually formalized by Kleene this axiom serves as the foundation for computer science. It lays out a framework for computation and defines the limits of what problems can be computed.
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How does a computer chip work?
Skipping over a few decades of research (and vacuum tubes) puts us at modern microprocessors. Today microprocessors are found in basically every piece of consumer electronics including your TV, car, tablet, and obviously laptop. But how do these actually work? At a fundamental level, it’s not as complicated as you think.
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Why should I learn about compilers?
Now we’ve built a microprocessor but how do we do anything useful with it? You’ve probably heard people talk about “programming languages” and a compiler is the tool that makes them magical. Read on to learn how a compiler translates text written by humans into instructions a machine can understand.
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How Does the Internet Work?
Ok we’ve established what can be computed, how processors work, and how we program them. Now we just need to get online. Unfortunately, it’s a morass of acronyms but the pieces generally fit together logically.
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