Hello and welcome to The Looking Glass, WBGS' very own Academic Blog. This year we are planning to breathe new life into this amazing blog as the Academic Head Boy team for 2025- 2026! However, at the Looking Glass we need your help to catapult this blog into it's GOLDEN AGE. We need your articles, your essays, your opinions and your finest work to MAKE THE LOOKING GLASS GREAT AGAIN! If you have read something interesting or watched something that sparked a thought on social media - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you entered a competition, however big or small - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you are interested in a specific field, issue or period - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you have produced artwork, a piece of music or creative writing - WE WILL PUBLISH IT! Your creative skills have been called to action - now we must muster to create, discover and explore. You are the creative minds of the future. The Plato's, the Newtons, the Angelo's, the Nietzsche's. This is your calling. This is Y...
This article placed third in the inaugural Fuller Research Prize competition 2021 HAMISH STARLING Even the least technical among us are familiar with programming languages in a loose sense: purposefully invented syntaxes constructed from keywords, symbols and identifiers used to tell a computer what to do. These confections power our modern world. From the operating system on which you are reading this article to the aeroplane which just passed overhead, most things are now controlled by code. So to fully comprehend the scope, characteristics and limitations of computers, it was realised in the 1950s that understanding the computational structures behind language was critical. In this piece I’ll discuss the Chomsky Hierarchy, a mathematical classification of languages into 4 types - regular, context-free, context-sensitive and recursively enumerable - explaining what each means. We’ll also discuss why this concept is relevant in the real world and how it links to “Automata”. Lang...