Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago. The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse. To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
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...