Call for Proposals

As a club, we're interested in exploring all areas of computation and are currently reading the New Turing Omnibus as a gateway to many topics in the field. To choose what we will discuss at our next meeting, we use this page to propose topics (perhaps from the book or from your own interests) on which we will then vote.

If you'd like to learn more about a topic—be it a chapter from our current book or not—please add it below.

Voting

To cast your vote, please join our Slack channel and use emoji reactions to vote in the #votes channel. Alternatively you can vote by sending an email to our mailing list.

Comments

If you have questions or comments about this process or any of the proposals, please feel to speak to us on Slack. If this clarifies a proposal or changes it, please update this page.

Proposals

• Multitouch gesture algorithms
  • Alex S: I recently managed to get my Fingerworks Keyboard working again by liberal application of mallet, and I was thinking about how I could use two of the new magic trackpads which are very large, to make a keyboard like the touchstream. Is learning about multitouch gesture recognition algorithms of interest to anyone?
• The New Turing Omnibus
  • Chapter 1: Algorithms
  • Chapter 2: Finite Automata
  • Chapter 3: Systems of Logic
  • Chapter 4: Simulation
  • Chapter 7: The Chomsky Hierarchy
  • Chapter 10: Program Correctness
  • Chapter 13: Boolean Logic
  • Chapter 14: Regular Languages
  • Chapter 15: Time and Space Complexity
    • Chris P: This might not be the most fun chapter, but I think it would probably broaden our understanding of other things, like algorithms and some of the terminology in the book.
  • Chapter 17: The Random Access Machine
  • Chapter 18: Spline Curves
  • Chapter 19: Computer Vision
    • Chris P: Very interested in this chapter. I did a module in this at university and I've been meaning to revisit at some point.
  • Chapter 20: Karnaugh Maps
  • Chapter 21: The Newton-Raphson Method
  • Chapter 22: Minimum Spanning Trees
  • Chapter 23: Generative Grammars
  • Chapter 24: Recursion
  • Chapter 25: Fast Multiplication
  • Chapter 26: Nondeterminism
  • Chapter 28: Encoders and Multiplexers
  • Chapter 29: CAT Scanning
  • Chapter 30: The Partition Problem
    • Chris P: Would be interested in this. I like discrete, well-defined problems to play with.
  • Chapter 31: Turing Machines
  • Chapter 33: Analog Computing
    • Chris P: Spaghetti Computers. Enough said.
  • Chapter 36: Neural Networks That Learn
    • Chris P: I've never fully understood how you teach neural networks things. Would be interested in this.
  • Chapter 38: Sequential Circuits
  • Chapter 39: Noncomputable Functions
  • Chapter 40: Heaps and Merges
  • Chapter 41: NP-Completeness
    • Chris P: Ties into some of my Sentient work, so would be keen to get the book's perspective (and the club's).
    • Paul M: We keep using this phrase (and "NP-Hard") but I'd love to know more about it.
  • Chapter 42: Number Systems for Computing
  • Chapter 43: Storage by Hashing
  • Chapter 45: Cook's Theorem
    • Chris P: Ties into some of my Sentient work, so would be keen to get the book's perspective (and the club's).
  • Chapter 46: Self-Replicating Computers
    • Chris P: This sounds fun.
  • Chapter 48: The SCRAM
  • Chapter 49: Shannon's Theory
  • Chapter 50: Detecting Primes
  • Chapter 51: Universal Turing Machines
  • Chapter 52: Text Compression
  • Chapter 53: Disk Operating Systems
  • Chapter 54: NP-Complete Problems
    • Chris P: Ties into some of my Sentient work, so would be keen to get the book's perspective (and the club's).
  • Chapter 55: Iteration and Recursion
    • Murray Steele: I haven't read this, and I don't know if we'd need to cover Chapter 24 first to bring everyone up to speed, but the idea that recursive algorithms can (always?) be re-written as an iterative one is something that I "know" but have no real understanding of. I don't know if there's a mechanical process for doing it, or if you just have to squint at the problem long enough or what. The chapter uses Towers of Hanoi to explore this idea and I think we could read it and then program (as a mob, or in groups) both flavours of solution to see what we learn about that process.
  • Chapter 56: VLSI Computers
  • Chapter 57: Linear Programming
  • Chapter 59: The Halting Problem
    • Paul M: Tom covered this in his Impossible Programs talk but it might be valuable to discuss as a group (particularly after whetting our appetite with Gödel's work).
  • Chapter 60: Computer Viruses
    • Chris P: If this has anything to do with quines and Kleene's theorem, then yes. Otherwise, probably not.
  • Chapter 61: Searching Strings
  • Chapter 62: Parallel Computing
  • Chapter 63: The Word Problem
  • Chapter 64: Logic Programming
  • Chapter 65: Relational Data Bases
  • Chapter 66: Church's Thesis