The view from Sussex University Library Introduction POPLOG is an integrated toolkit providing a highly extendable collection of languages and tools suitable for absolute beginners, advanced researchers and system programmers. The toolkit was developed at Sussex University during the 80s. While POPLOG is no longer actively developed, the environment is still useful for prototyping applications.…
The Victorian Internet
Morse Code Straight Key J-38 (Photo credit: Whiskeygonebad) The other week I stumbled across a post about Morse keyers and decided to write some Python code for sending and understanding morse code. Before presenting the code listings, a little bit of history won't go amiss. The first Morse code message was sent on the 24th May, 1844,…
Words that can be either a noun, verb adjective or adverb
Here is a list of words each of which can be either a noun, verb, adjective or adverb. A presentation made from some of the words in this list is available on slideshare. Their definitions, which are taken from the Wordnet lexical database of English, follow. back best better bitter broadside clean clear close cod…
Implementing Finite State Machines in Python with popmatches – Part 1
Introduction Chosing the right representation for your data is at the heart of efficient AI programming as we are reminded in the book edited by Daniel G. Bobrow and Allan Collins, titled "Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science". However, quite often, the good old list will do or at least is a good place…
Some reflections on AI programming (coffee break history)
LISP and AI programming Lisp was conceived of as a language for symbolic computation and became the main "AI" language, especially for expert systems, NLP and other types of Pattern Directed Inference Systems. AI, at the time when the first LISP was implemented (John McCarthy 1960), was very different from the AI that is in…
Steampunk Computers – something to do at the weekend
The Parallel Rendering of Webpages
This presentation describes the hardware and software environment for experimenting with the Parallel Rendering of Webpages. The hardware consists of a cluster of Single Board Computers (SBCs) which run a number of application servers that previously ran in the cloud (RHC and Pythonanywhere). Each application server was associated with a single application which was either…
Parallella LISP – the runtime environment
This series of blog posts describes the Parrallella-LISP source code and how to build applications requiring a combination of symbolic and numeric computation. To this end, two example applications will also be blogged about. The first application represents the meaning of documents with vector semantics and the second, extracts contours from binary images. If you…
LISP for the parallella board
LISP has a long distinguished history and is the second oldest high level programming language in use today. My interest in this language led me to create a version for the Parellella board. The starting point was a blog post on the parallella forum discussing how much LISP could fit on the board. In trying…
Supercomputing with the Parallella board
Some twenty years ago I set up a company to configure parallel computers for image processing applications. Unfortunately, demand wasn't very high because of the poor price/performance ratio and the advent of RISC processors which surpassed it. I was therefore very excited when about a year ago Adapteva created a kickstarter project to offer affordable…
Language, Thought & Computation 