It's been another crazy (but very enjoyable) week for me. Tuesday was of course the night of the US election. I nearly went to bed as I'd been at a formal dinner with all the computer science students at my college and then to the cinema to see Quantum of Solace (which I highly recommend by the way). So by the time I got home at about 12:30am I thought I might just go to bed, then I came to my senses are realised that it would be great to witness this historical election live and to share in the experience with my friends. So I went down to the Cambridge Union with some friends and stayed up until Obama's acceptance speech -around 5am for us! There were so many students down at the Cambridge Union all night- joining in, cheering, and celebrating the final outcome. It was great to be part of it! I attemped to take a photo from the balcony with my phone, sadly it was too dark for my phone to capture the scene properly.

This week it seems I have done more talking and discussing than reading- but that's probably not the end of the world as some nice ideas have been forming about structured grid programming this week- especially yesterday- but I won't divulge anymore at the moment.
One thing I have noticed recently is that every week I somehow end up having a conversation with someone about Lucid or my work with Lucid. It seems that there are still a few people around who are interested in this gem of a language!

On another note: I have removed the doodles from this blog and moved them into their own section in an attempt to keep my blog a bit more serious and free from my unfunny and bizarre doodles! I have posted a new doodle this weekend.
See you all later, Dominic.

Yesterday I attended the Many-core Computing workshop at Cambridge organised by a group of researchers at Cambridge University who are using many-core devices (such as GPUs) to accelerate their scientific applications. There were a few nice presentations showing the latest techniques that people are employing for fast computation using hardware such as the NVidia Geforce 8 Series and 9 Series cards, and using tools such as CUDA, writing simulations in C.
I went along as my current main research interest is the development of compilers, language extensions, and languages for parallel programming- especially those targeted at many-core architectures. I am very interested in the Data Parallel Haskell extension for GHC, which facilitates data parallell programming in Haskell. There is a good chance I will be devoting a reasonable amount of time to this system in my research, hence at the workshop I spent a lot of time thinking, "How can we get these guys using Haskell?" and "Would these guys EVER use Haskell?" The workshop made me see how attached the scientific community are to C (and sometimes to FORTRAN), and I've been trying to ascertain why? Any suggestions? Here are some possibilities:

• They were brought up, or educated, using procedural/imperative languages.
• There are extensive libraries available for C.
• There is a very short learning time to using these languages.
• They like the constructs- the array handling, re-assignment, statements, side effects, and global variables?
• Imperative semantics and constructs fit our default mental model of the world better than those of functional programming? [Is this true... maybe...]

Or all of the above? I had a really interesting conversation with Nick Maclaren at the workshop about various languages topics and how people like FORTRAN because of the first-class arrays and overloaded arithmetic operators for arrays. Maybe we need to make our functional array syntax and constructs better!

Anyway... so apart from these things I had a silly idea the other day for a humorous little comic and just quickly doodled it out. I will post this in a separate post that will appear below:

So I have been doing my PhD for 3 weeks now and am really enjoying it. It's a great feeling to finally get to read and enjoy all the things I have been keeping on the back-burner until now.

At Cambridge there are so many great opportunities to meet some very smart people and to attend some really excellent talks on a range of topics. I may at some point post some links to some of the research topics I have been reading and hearing about in the last 3 weeks. So much stuff to learn- so little time!

This doodle is an approximation of me at my desk.. thinking about the construction of existential types in Haskell via the "forall" type quantifier - and the Curry-Howard isomorphism proof of its construction [forall a. (a -> K) = (exists a . a) -> K].

This brilliant hard science fiction novel by Greg Egan is as much gripping as it is intelligent and thought-provoking. Egan combines transhumanism, consciousness, multiverses, extra-dimensional theory, wormholes, astrobiology, computational equivalence, and much more, into a rivetting tale of the human race's search for immortality. The book begins in the year 2975. The human race has split into three factions: fleshers- what is left of homo sapiens, Gleisner robots- simulated human brains running inside of humanoid robots, and polises- supercomputers hosting millions of consciousnesses, free from any physical restrictions within their own simulated worlds and free from death- or so they think. The book follows a group of polis inhabitants, particularly Yatima, an orphan born inside the Konishi polis. Roughly twenty years after Yatima's birth it is discovered that a local binary star is collapsing inexplicably faster than the known physics should dictate, the eventual collapse of which causes a gamma ray burst destroying much of Earth's surface life. The polises (and Gleisner robots) survive. One such surviving polis embark on a mission to understand what has happened and to prevent something as bad, or worse, happening again. The diaspora occurs when the polis make a thousand clones of itself and many of its citizens, sending them off into the universe to find answers. This book takes you on a vast journey leaving you feeling like you've travelled billions of light years in your own understanding to get where you are. The interactions between humans and the polis citizens is particularly interesting, as well as the clever use of extrapolated physics from the current theories and ideas of our time. Another interesting quirk of the book is that Egan uses gender-neutral pronouns for the polis members who have opted to have a neutral gender. Definitely worth a read!

Diaspora Greg Egan Image from Amazon.co.uk Find this book on: GreenMetropolis Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com