In our databases unit, we have been exploring forms, queries and reports. In one scenario, we had to alter the design of the form which would then affect the report. A screenshot of this report is shown below.
Computer Games Design
In this unit, we have been typing up the different ways that you can interact with games. Below is an extract from what I’ve written so far:
By using the remote control for the TV, games can be played on services such as Sky and Teletext. On Teletext, you can play a quiz game called Bamboozle. The game would present you with a question and you would need to select what you though the answer was by pressing the fastext button associated with the answer (red, green, yellow or blue).
Client Side Customisation of Web Pages,
During the 20th unit, Client Side Customisation of Web Pages, we have begun creating a few web pages that describe CSS. The screenshot below shows the HTML document of one of my pages.
When this is loaded onto a browser, it produces the following:
Alan Turing and the Turing machine
On June 23rd 1912 the creator of the Turing machine, Alan Turing, was born in London. He would later go on to be known as the Father of Computer Science. Despite his obvious talents, Turing was mostly considered to be an average pupil at the Sherborne School which was showcased with his handwriting and English skills. In maths, however, it was a completely different story as he preferred to create his own methods to solve problems instead of those that were taught by the teachers. During his time at this school, he managed to win almost every mathematics prize. His different methods were also showcased in chemistry classes where he, again, preferred using his own agenda, much to the ire of his teachers.
Following on from this, in 1929, Turing undertook a scholarship exam but only won an exhibition. Not content with this, he tried again the following year and was awarded the scholarship. Then in 1931, he enrolled with Kings College in Cambridge to study mathematics. During his time at the college which also coincided with Adolf Hitler’s rise in power, he joined the anti-war movement. Turing graduated from the college in 1934 and attended an Advanced Foundation of Maths course which was hosted by Max Newman, during the following spring. In the same year, he was elected as a fellow of Kings College due to a dissertation he had written which was titled On the Gaussian error function. This document proved a fundamental amount of results on the probability theory or more specifically, the central limit theorem. This theorem had actually been recently discovered but as Turing was unaware of this, he discovered it independently.
In 1936 he began to work on a thought experiment for a device that would later be known as the Turing machine. The device consists of a head or scanner which tape passes through. On each square of the tape, a binary number is displayed – this is either 0 or 1. In order to work, it relies on four different states which are called a, b, c and d. The ‘a’ symbol prints a 0 on the tape and moves one square to the right, the ‘b’ moves the tape one square to the right, the ‘c’ prints a 1 on the tape and moves one square to the right and the ‘d’ moves the tape one square to the right. The Turing machine has six different operations – it can read a symbol, write a symbol, move the tap left, move the tape right, change the state and stop completely. The head of the machine can also be programmed by the user by altering the internal wiring. It is then set in motion by printing the binary numbers onto the tape and moving the head to the square of tape on the left. There is also a Universal Turing machine. Instead of altering the wiring, the user would translate the instruction table into binary and print the result onto the tape.
Turing’s creations were very influential during World War II. Over the course of the war, the Germans transmitted thousands of coded messages. These message would range from weather reports, situation reports and even orders from Hitler himself. Thanks to the work of Turing and other allied codebreakers, these were usually translated within 1 to 2 hours. On one occasion, a translated message was read within 15 minutes of it being transmitted. Turing was set up at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes and over the years this became known as a codebreaking factory. Eventually, he needed to find a way to crack a large number of message flowing from a new German cipher. The breakthrough for this came in 1942 when Turing was able to crack detailed German strategies as well as conversations with Hitler and his generals. In 1943, his inventions were cracking 84,000 messages a month which equated to two messages every minute. This information would then go on to change the course of the war. Historians believe that Turing’s codebreaking, especially that of the German U-boats enigma, shortened the war by two to four years and saved millions of lives.
In 1945, Turing was awarded with the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his contribution during the war. London’s National Physical Laboratory invited him to design a computer. He submitted a report in 1946 about the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). His designs were considered to be too ambitious which caused several delays. He returned to Cambridge in 1947 and studied some different subjects – neurology and physiology. During this time, he still kept computing in his mind and wrote some code for programming computers. He had also developed an interest in athletics by joining the Walton Athletic Club and setting records in their three and then mile championships. He also participated in the A.A.A. marathon and came fifth.
Turing resigned from the National Physical Laboratory in 1948 to take a readership at the university of Manchester which had been offered to him by Max Newman. Computing machinery and intelligence in Mind was published by Turing in 1950. It was here that he proposed the Turing test which is still tested today to find out if a computer can truly be intelligent. For his work on the Turing machine back in 1936, he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society in 1951. He was working on a new theory during this time – the application of mathematical theory to biological forms. The first part of his morphogenesis theoretical study which is the development pattern and form within living organisms was published in 1952.
Turing had been having a relationship with a man and as homosexuality was a crime at the time, he was arrested in 1952. He had actually turned himself in as he was being threatened with blackmail. He was tried and found guilty of this offence on March 31st 1952 and was given a choice of jail time or chemical castration. So that he would freely be able to continue his academic plans, he chose chemical castration which consisted of taking oestrogen for a year. While working at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), he was labelled as a security risk which made the security officers uneasy about working there and they started investigating his foreign contacts. On June 8th 1954,Turing died after eating an apple that had been laced with cyanide. Although it was officially ruled as a suicide, some people believe that it was an accident or that he had been murdered – for being gay or because security services believed he would leak secrets. On December 24th 2013, 59 years after his death, Turing received a royal pardon for his conviction of homosexuality.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18419691
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Turing.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25495315
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