Viewing profile — dkfellows

You need tools adequate to the task, but the task isn't necessarily what other people think it is. In this case, I'd bet the tasks are to learn what's going on inside a database an…

Almost all quoting for non-trivial cases comes down to the [list] command. It does the Right Thing, especially in the critical cases where you're generating a command to call later…

The main issue with supporting those IDEs is that the Language Server Protocol is vast and really quite complicated. More than a weekend's work to go to doing the interesting bits …

Python has nothing at all like safe interpreters (I've looked). You just can't prevent things from leaking, it isn't designed for it at all. You can do a half-hearted approach by s…

Well, there are classes and objects in there now. They're designed for modelling pretty heavyweight entities like widgets instead of lightweight things like linked lists. It was a …

Technically, all values are considered subtypes of strings, but the notion of types is quite different to those of many other languages. In particular, Tcl's types do not describe …

Tcl uses a memory model internally where each piece of memory belongs strictly to the thread that allocated it, with this enforced in lots of places. There are a few loopholes past…

Technically, Tcl's internal type system is that all other value types are subtypes of string, universally serializable to string, and will correctly round-trip through string. But …

That's an excellent question! It's not at all like IP. The basic message size is (IIRC) 64 or 96 bits, comprising a system control word, an application header word, and an optional…

It's basically very different in approach to many modern computers. The cores are slow and low-powered, but the interconnect is very fast for routing small packets to multiple dest…

It really depends on whether you include the memory in that count, as memory uses masses of transistors without being very interesting as most of those transistors spend their time…

There isn't a plan to do the whole human brain, and doing so would require both at least two further generations of hardware and likely building a new facility for deploying it in.…

> Science journalism is generally just awful. Not just science journalism. I've yet to see a journalist get a story 100% right where I knew the facts personally ahead of time. If y…

It theoretically has 1036800 processors. It doesn't actually have that many because core-level manufacturing yields aren't 100%. The software architecture is designed to be resilie…

The million was a figure chosen to be eye-catching to funders and to force the initial design team to address scalability from the beginning, according to Steve Furber. So yes, it'…

SpiNNaker is particularly for studying neural structure, especially on the scale from small groups of neurons up to brain structures of a few million, on timespans of a few seconds…

The unit cost of a chip isn't too much. The price of doing the design and creating the masks for the silicon OTOH...

> Specifically, how will you prevent SpiNNaker from going down the same path as the Connection Machine - (stops doing AI stuff because, say, geneticists want to use it for protein …

The next generation will have single precision hardware floats, but that's still at the prototype stage (with little bits of the processor running on a monster FPGA in the lab). Th…

The processor cores in SpiNNaker run at 200MHz (yes, this is slow!), and can usually issue one instruction per CPU cycle (that's quite nice). However, the trick to getting lots of …

Our press office are definitely a law unto themselves, but the analogy was drawn in the event. It's also inaccurate, as it doesn't count the extra ~billion gates per chip for the m…

The brain definitely is able to use not just spiking frequency (which is approximately the same as EEG voltage, though not really) but also spiking patterns to encode information. …

FWIW, this is based on SpiNNaker, which is a system with a million CPU cores and a custom low-power multicast network backplane. It's possible to do simpler neural models with much…

We can do dynamic networking — the routing tables for the hardware is reloadable at runtime — but it's sufficiently difficult to do the routing computations that we only do that wh…

The usual problem is to do with managing list construction, and the usual answer is the [list] command, which Does The Right Thing for sane code. We also made sure that such lists …