Reflection — Week 1

What is code? I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of being able to code. My parents are actually experts at using platforms like Mathematica and terminal for every day work related tasks. My parents are both physicists so they’re pretty good at it. Coding is a language and it is a means to programming and the pathway to the future. I think that it’s a very useful skill to have, especially for a designer. I personally have never truly coded except for a brief class I has in foundation year with Gautam which involved using Arduino to program lights to behave in a particular sequence.

I have used Terminal once as a kid to open movies through the specific commands but then again that was a very menial task. I would like to learn as much as I can and I’m really looking forward to this class. Watching the documentary on the creation of Sketchpad by the Ivan Sutherland was very interesting. It was a contribution towards the present day state of computer graphics. Another interesting piece of history was the first chatbot ELIZA. The way that the present day Siri interacts with humans is still not as far off from using ELIZA. There is a certain chain of words that are used in daily conversation that the Chatbot has no trouble answering but usually if the question requires the chatbot to give its opinion, that is when the conversation hits a dead end, which is to be expected. Whereas direct question are easier to process into the Chatbot’s algorithm. Nevertheless there has been an colossal advancement in artificial intelligence within the current century.

Within the world of coding the language of binary is an integral part of it. In class we were asked a question about a king with a thousand bottles and one of those bottles is poisoned and this needs to be figured out over a span of 24 hours. I realised that the best way to think about the possible outcomes is through binary. By labelling the bottles using binary numbers (0,1) and setting a correspondence between labelling bottles and serving one drop of wine from the bottles to the 10 prisoners we can deduce which bottle is poisoned. By realising that 2 to the power of 10 = 1024 which is > 1000 then the ability to figure out which bottle of wine is poisoned within a span of 24 hours is possible. Since the number of outcomes is greater than the number of bottles.

I have never used Python and i’m looking forward to it as I realise that the ability to code will significantly expand my horizon as a visual artist and a designer.