The Looking Glass

  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...

This essay came in second place in the inaugural Fuller Research Prize Competition 2021.   LAKSHMAN RAJALOGANATHAN  ‘Paper money is going away’. ‘Bitcoin is a fraud’. Two distinct quotes from two distinct industry icons. The first from Elon Musk, an advocate for cryptocurrency who had accepted Bitcoin payments for Tesla cars and has been monumental in the recent cryptocurrency slump, due to his retraction of this implementation as a result of the use of ‘fossil fuels for mining’. The second quote was taken from an interview with Jamie Dimon, the Chief Executive officer at JPMorgan Chase. Following his labelling of the virtual currency to be fraudulent, in October 2020, JP Morgan commented that Bitcoin is solidly competing with gold, and that ‘the potential long-term upside for Bitcoin is considerable.’ On the 19th of May, a multitude of cryptocurrency plummeted in price and market cap. There were a plethora of reasons behind this "Crypto Crash" and the following dissertation ...