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When the lights go out and the entire world is thrust into the technological nether, we'll need board games like Turing Tumble. Created programmer Paul Boswell – he's well known for programming complex games for Texas Instruments calculators – and maker Alyssa Boswell, the Turing Tumble lets you use small parts to create logic flows in order to solve puzzles.
Boswell created the game to teach everyone how to program. It rose out of frustration. In his work at the University of Minnesota he found himself stuck with scientists who couldn't manage programming or computational analysis.
[...] The game is simple. The set of marbles roll one at a time from the top of the board through a series of pins and "logic" pieces. When the marble hits a flipper at the bottom it releases another ball – creating a computing cycle.
"Players add logic to the game board by placing six different types of parts onto the board. The 'Bit' is a particularly important one. Each time a ball runs over it, it flips to point the opposite direction. Pointing to the left is like a '0', and pointing to the right is like a '1.' Gear bits are the most interesting part, though. Gear bits are just like bits, except that they can be connected to one another so that when one is flipped, it flips the connected gear bits, too. It's these parts that make the computer Turing-complete," said Boswell.
Seems reminiscent of the Digi-Comp II.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday June 01 2017, @11:23PM (1 child)
I am completely convinced that elementary particle physicists are the world's worst programmers.
When I finished the code for my senior thesis - in fortran - I invited the graduate students and postdocs to look at it. They were dumbfounded by its simplicity and clarity.
I said "The reason physics software is so hard to write is that YOU PHYSICISTS MAKE IT HARD!"
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 02 2017, @03:09AM
Many particle physics calculations have been around since before computers, they should be pretty easy to program, especially by now.
I reviewed a Physics PhD's code for dose estimation, found he had an extra un-necessary level of looping in it - took that out and sped up the result by a factor of 100. Even after we demonstrated multiple identical results between the two algorithms he still couldn't accept that the faster way got the correct (same) result.
🌻🌻 [google.com]