Hello once again my fellow science nerds and/or people who clicked on this by accident. I want to start off by apologising for not posting in ages, but between adjusting to A levels, applying for university and writing an EPQ I haven't had a lot of time, which I really regret (although I already have offers from Warwick and Liverpool so yay).
I was about to sit down and work on my EPQ when I realised that a good way to kill two birds with one stone would be to write about some stuff I've been researching, as a blog post! Solidify my own understanding while getting to talk to you guys again :).
So here it is, this week I'll be using my newfound understanding to explain how the hell your computer is working, and your phone, and your tablet, and any microwaves, dishwashers, televisions or video game consoles you happen to have hanging around all work (wow we are pretty dependent aren't we?) because frankly we all take computers for granted and use them constantly, even being arrogant enough to complain when they don't function perfectly and sometimes treat them like crap, without realising that what we are using is truly a miracle of human engineering.
Quick poll now, raise your hand if you've seen the imitation game. If your hands are not currently in the air and you aren't remembering what a brilliant film it is then I suggest that that is the first thing you do after you finish reading this. However the gist of it is that a top lad known as Alan Turing invents a computer, saves everyone in WW2 and turns the world on its head because he just designed a bloody computer and its 1940 when they still have teams of people instead of a pocket calculator.
Now Britain, being all secretive and such decide to keep all this hidden to the extent that the story did not emerge properly until around the 1970s and Turing never got the thanks that he truly deserved for shortening a world war by a year. So in this time America decided to build their own computers (not knowing what had happened in Britain) and eventually came up with the electronic numerical integrator and calculator (ENIAC) A.K.A this monster
Over time thanks to the work of Von Neumann and other scientists, computing science flourished in America, who remained astounded at the equally impressive work occurring in the UK who they thought had no experience with this sort of stuff before.
As always the technology just got better and better and found its way into everything and now we rely on digital computers and their many uses to get us through most days. but enough history, I said I'd explain how they work and now I'll give it a shot.
All computers can be linked all the way back to Alan Turing because frankly the man was brilliant. In 1936, Alan Turing wrote a truly incredible paper known as "On Computable Numbers" which laid out the ideas for a perfect computer (basically a theoretical one that was created using maths). the idea was that any problem could be written as binary code, and by applying the appropriate transformation to this binary code you will get the answer to this problem. This also means that any program can be executed so long as you can represent it purely as maths, which is why coders have to use specific codes and convert it to binary code after. For example when a computer multiplies 2 and 3 it will multiply 01 and 11 to get 011 (six) because it can only work in binary code. Without looking into too much detail, it can be said that by performing a number of simple logical operations on a number you can get the answer, which is where algorithms come in.
An algorithm is a mathematical step by step recipe, much like a lego instruction booklet or a recipe for a cake, you put in stuff (numbers) follow it step by step and get an output. But the important thing is that you can do complex mathematical sums by doing several simple stages, for example to multiply a number by n you simply add the number (n-1) times or in a sightly more complex algorithm here's the one for the square root of a number.As you can see they only get more complex, with many rearranging an equation to find x in terms of guesses for value of x like a sequence, instead of the output in a method known as iteration.
And now the clever ones among you will be wondering how does a machine known what to do, and the short answer is that it doesn't, the computer doesn't actually know anything, that's the beauty of it, it is just a machine which feeds this data into a bunch of microscopic switches known as transistors.
These transistors may or may not change depending on the value which flows through them as an electrical impulse which is key, as this means that they can be arranged in little patterns known as logic gates. When data passes through these they will do a very specific function, such as changing the ones and zeroes to the opposite, only changing the ones, or only changing the zeroes, or doing all kinds of crazy little things. But the gist of it is that after doing a lot of these little things, they will eventually form a pattern which will cause a big change to the output number and will give you your answer.
Whew that was a lot of intense knowledge. I hope I managed to find a balance these as its hard to give a good explanation without going into too much boring mathsy detail, but if I tell you that a high end mobile phone's processor actually has 1 billion transistors ticking away in its processor and the Xbox one in my room actually had 5 billion on own its processor, maybe it'll help you to appreciate what geniuses humans are.
Once again sorry for the lack of posts, I actually have started drafts for posts on castles, insanity and "The Martian" which I am still trying to think of a subject for but I just haven't had the time to finish them all, however I'll soon have a lot more free time and hopefully be able to start churning out science to my hearts content once more.
As always thanks for reading and I hope this has peaked your interest in how complex even the stuff that has been made by people can be. Maybe if we keep doing science, one day a human will be able to point at something and say truthfully "I understand that completely" but frankly thats a long way off yet. I shall leave you with my personal favorite quot from a robot.
"Bleepity Bloop Bloop" - R2D2
Peace out homies :)
