The Jacquard Loom, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace.
Pāṇini, al-Khwarizmi, al-Jazari, Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers, Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, Bugs and Hacking.
Bonus: Fuzzy logic, Computer Vision and Neural Networks.
1. Boolean algebra and control flow.
Boolean algebra, named after George Boole. The Boolean data type is a common to most programming languages - only two values - True (1) or False (0). One is true, nothing is false.
Boolean operators allow you to combine or invert boolean data types - the three basic ones are AND, OR and NOT.
Control flow in programming is how you control the flow of which part of the program is executed next.
Instead of writing long lists of commands, one after another, functions allow programmers to package up functionality into smaller mini programs, known as functions or subroutines.
Take input and return an output - an example might be a function that returns the square of an input number, or as complicated as the answer to everything.
C++ is an example of an object orientated language. C was one of its predecessors and functional. The ++ means increment, hence C++ being one better than C. (-;
Charles Babbage is the inventor of the concept of a digital computer. Babbage was aware of the Jacquard Loom and expanded upon the punch card to invent both the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine.
Ada Lovelace was the worlds first computer programmer, even realising that the computer could be used to make music and art.
5. Pāṇini, al-Khwarizmi, al-Jazari, Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers, Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, Bugs and Hacking.
Pāṇini pioneered a grammar that incorporated metarules and recursion - making the first formal language.
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi formalised algebra, his name gave rise to the word algorithm and introduced the decimal system to the western world.
Ismail al-Jazari invented programmable machines, including programmable humanoid robots and an astronomical clock considered the first programmable analogue computer.
5. Pāṇini, al-Khwarizmi, al-Jazari, Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers, Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, Bugs and Hacking (continued).
Alan Turing formalised the concept of the algorithm and computation in general. During the Second World War he led the team that broke German Naval codes. He went on to design one of the first stored program computers and did pioneering work in Morphogenesis, or how living things form themselves. He was prosecuted by the British Government for being gay, and committed suicide in 1954. If an system is capable of general computation it is said to be Turing complete. The Turing test is a test of machine intelligence in comparison to human intelligence.
Tommy Flowers was the engineer who built Turing's machine.
Hacker culture is about curiosity, not breaking into computer systems. You are all hackers now.
6. Bonus: Fuzzy logic, Computer Vision and Neural Networks.
Fuzzy logic is a logic where results be other numbers between 0 and 1 - rather than one or the other. It's very useful for controlling systems which are analogue, like a washing machine.
Computer vision in computer science is the study of making computers able to understand images or video.
t-SNE is a machine learning technique for collapsing multidimensional data into two or three dimensions - simply put, a great way of visualising a set of images and their relationship to each other.
Bonus: Fuzzy logic, Computer Vision, Neural Networks, Adam Harvey, Bias and Anti-Facist AI. (continued)
Adam Harvey makes art projects about privacy, computer vision, and surveillance.