The Looking Glass

Given limited resources, should the scientific community focus on broadening our horizons or improving standard of living? Should efforts be focused on broadening our horizons or ameliorating standard of living? The scientific community stands at a crossroads between this mind wrenching decision. On one hand, limited resources can be directed to expanding the frontiers of knowledge through space exploration, artificial intelligence and quantum computing, offering the promise of innovation and long term survival. On the other hand by tackling poverty, enhancing healthcare and mitigating climate change, tangible and immediate benefits can be achieved for billions of people. Billions of lives. Billions of futures. Neither approach is wrong but constrained budgets and competing priorities necessitate different choices. This essay will examine the debate over where scientific efforts should be focused, weighing the merits and challenges of both broadening our horizons and improving the s...

Robin Elfsberg (12R) This essay received top of the 'Commended' category in the 2022 Witold Pilecki History Essay Prize, out of more than 150 entries from across the country. The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 retains a certain sort of infamy in histories of Cold War Europe- indeed, in the history of the 20th Century. A failed attempt to throw off the shackles imposed by the Soviet Union during their ‘Great Patriotic War’, it was a clear demonstration to the world of the seemingly unchanging face of authoritarian communism and the lengths that the new dictator of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, would go in order to keep and consolidate his power. Much talk has been around the fact that none of the Western powers had actively intervened when they had done so a year before NATO’s foundation in the Berlin Airlift, where the commitment had been to be a defence against the USSR and the communist satellite states that formed the Eastern Bloc. The general assertion was that there had been an...

  DYLAN JOHN (Y9) This article placed 3rd in the WBGS Fuller Research Prize Competition 2022. Childhood and Family  Mao Zedong (毛泽东), was born in December 1893 in a small town named Shaoshan village. His father was called Mao Yichang and was a former peasant who had become one of the richest and most successful farmers in the area. Whilst growing up in this area, his father had taught Zedong discipline and was noted to harshly beat his children for just the slightest of mistakes. Mao also had a strict Buddhist upbringing mainly due to his mother, Wen Qimei, who was a devoted Buddhist. However, these teachings did not last for long: in his mid-teen years, Zedong completely abandoned the religion.  At the age of 8, Zedong was sent to the local Shaoshan school, in which he was taught how to read and write. He later said that he did not much enjoy schooling, as it included reading many classical Chinese texts, which he found extremely boring. He enjoyed reading western novels...

  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...