Category Archives: Computer science

The coming politicization of mathematics and computer science

Increasingly, ordinary people encrypt their internet communications. Some want to share files. Some are worried about the increasing surveillance and threats of surveillance of Internet data that is taking place in many corners of the world. ACTA, Hadopi, data retention would be a few examples. People may simply wish to keep their data private, even […]

Utilitarianism and computability

I’ve started watching Michael Sandel’s Harvard lecture series on political philosophy, “justice”. In this series, Sandel introduces the ideas of major political and moral philosophers, such as Bentham, Locke, and Kant, as well as some libertarian thinkers I hadn’t heard of. I’m only halfway through the series, so I’m sure there’s other big names coming […]

Multiplayer protein folding game

You read it here first – Monomorphic predicted this development in February. In a recent Nature article, researchers describe a multiplayer online graphical protein folding game, in which players collaborate against the computer to fold a protein correctly quickly. (Also: NYTimes article.) It turned out that the human players were successful compared to the computers, […]

Continuous computing

Disclaimer: I haven’t checked academic sources for any of the statements made in this post – all of it is speculation which may be affirmed or rejected by existing literature. Existing computing hardware and software are based on a discrete model: the Church-Turing model. The machinery is built on digital logic, and formalisms such as […]

On statefulness

Last year I made some attempts at free association around formal languages and state machines. But at that time, not much was said about the idea of a state itself; an idea which I think holds a lot of interesting uncharted territory. To begin with, what is state really? Intuitively the word distinguishes states of […]