I visited these all last year in a single trip to the UK and it was incredible. I can recommend it to anyone who has spent some time thinking about the history of computing.
I'd like to call out the work from Nada Amin in this area:
Dafny and verification-aware programming, including proof by induction to verify properties of programs (for example, that an optimizer preserves semantics). Dafny Sketcher (https://github.com/namin/dafny-sketcher)
Multi-stage programming, a principled approach to writing programs that write programs, and its incarnation in multi-stage relational programming for faster synthesis of programs with holes—with the theoretical insight that a staged interpreter is a compiler, and a staged relational interpreter for a functional language can turn functions into relations running backwards for synthesis.
multi-stage miniKanren (https://github.com/namin/staged-miniKanren)
> Anything more complex than a few lines, you can just copy it from lib\ folder of the CD-ROM. There's a component for everything. You want to left-pad a string?
“Zero success” seems a bit strong. People have been able to get 96% accuracy on MINST digits on their local machine.
https://norse.github.io/notebooks/mnist_classifiers.html
I think it may be more accurate to say “1970s level neural net performance”. The evidence suggests it is a nascent field of research.
I did the tour of Bletchley Park today and my Tour Guide said he'd met Betty Webb, that he mourned her loss, and that when he had met her at a reunion, she had remained tight-lipped about what her work had been on.
> These “limitations” inhibit truly intelligent behavior in machines, LeCun says. This is down to four key reasons: a lack of understanding of the physical world; a lack of persistent memory; a lack of reasoning; and a lack of complex planning capabilities.
The University that hosted "The Little Schemer" and all its derivatives. Those books were a delight and taught me to think about programming in a way that other languages had not. (Even if I didn't go to that University).
https://prl.khoury.northeastern.edu/teaching.html
I had been to a Scheme conference in Washington, adjunct to the Clojure Conference one year, and it was attended by many undergraduates from Northeastern, (and the authors of those books that I got a photo with.)
I have to feel sympathy for those undergraduates I spoke to. They gave a strong feeling, even then (8 years ago), that it was time for the University to move on in language choice.
I had a similar experience in the late 90s when the world was picking up Java, and our University insisted on teaching in Eiffel.
I’ve tried different part detectors, and nothing has been as good as the Google Image search (download the Google App if you’re on an iPhone.)
I’ve found it surprisingly good at identifying LEGO parts.
> Acorn did ship a computer with the 65816—the Acorn Communicator—but when Sophie Wilson visited WDC in 1983 and saw Mensch and crew laying out the 65816 by hand, it struck her: if this motley crew on a card table could design a CPU, so could Acorn. Thus Wilson and Steve Furber forged their own CPU: the Acorn RISC Machine.
The author spends lots of time modelling axial tilt to represent the seasons.
Then there was this gem:
> I also used this program to create digital building instructions. My takeaway from this is that it works really well for small models, but it has serious usability problems on larger models. When you make changes to the model or change an early step in the instructions, it will often break the layout of the instructions in many places so that most of it needs to be redone. This was a lot of tedious work, but I ended up with a 264 page, 436 step instructions PDF.
Charles Petzold (author of The Annotated Turing, and Code - The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software) is in the process of writing a book about this. You can see drafts here: