I went to the Computer Science department at the University of St. Andrews on Saturday, and was there introduced to a new game:

The concept is quite simple. Have you ever watched ‘Robot Wars’? Well it’s a similar thing, but everyone has mechanically identical robots, except they aren’t remotely controlled. They have to ‘think’ for themselves. Your job is program the artificial intelligence algorithm to get your robot to ‘out-smart’ the others. What a fantastic concept!

Steve Jobs did great things to the computing industry and was responsible for some of the nicest devices available. His death in October filled the media and respects were paid by many loyal Apple fans. Seven days later, however, came the death of another man, whose works were in my opinion far more important to the field of computing, and on whose ingenuity Apple’s success (along with that of so many other technology firms) relied. Dennis Ritchie invented the ‘C’ programming language: what is probably the most famous and most widely used language in existence. In fact there are almost no computer architectures in existence for which a C compiler has not been created. Not only was he responsible for the most successful programming language, he also co-invented the UNIX operating system (upon which Apple’s operating systems are incidentally based). Little was said in the media about the death of this man, but the result of his genius can be found in far more abundance than that of Steve Jobs’.

I apologise profusely to all my reader(s) for the infrequency with which I have been making these posts. I shall endeavour to create a lot more blog posts in the following year, which should indeed be a very important year in my life. Next year is the year in which I turn 18, get my A-levels, start university and move away from home so it would be a great shame not to reflect upon my adventures in this blog.

Nerdy stuff. This is the expression which most accurately summariss the content you can expect to see on my blog. I am interested in mathematics (particularly the maths involved in computing), linguistics and playing the ukulele. Sure, I also have one or two normal hobbies like Rugby, but what fun are they to talk about? I have a track record for starting projects like this and abandoning them very quickly and as a result, I do not know how often this blog will be updated (or indeed if it will be updated at all). Only time will tell.