quantum computing

Peter Shor tells the story of how he discovered Shor's Algorithm, from his early mathematics days to the quantum factoring breakthrough. It was recorded at MIT at the Physics of Computation conference.

Sean Carroll gives a Royal Institution talk tracing the history of quantum mechanics from Einstein and Bohr to today. He covers the Copenhagen interpretation and the many worlds interpretation.

Devine Lu Linvega of Hundred Rabbits talks about low-power, offline computing, esoteric languages and the Uxn virtual machine, informed by years of sailing the Pacific. The talk frames computing sustainability through a permaculture lens.

3Blue1Brown, in collaboration with minutephysics, introduces the math of superposition and quantum states using polarized light. It builds up the quantum behavior of photons as a simple counting and probability problem.

Dave Ackley demonstrates the Demon Horde Sort, an inherently robust sorting machine running in his Movable Feast Machine simulator. This is the uncut version with all details and side thoughts.

The first episode of the BBC's 1982 television series The Computer Programme, introducing home computing to a general audience. It surveys mainframes, early personal computers such as the BBC Micro and Commodore PET, and the changing computer market of the time.

Veritasium explains why analog computing may suit AI workloads, covering old analog computers, The Analog Thing and Mythic's analog chips that use flash memory for neural network inference. It argues digital hardware is hitting limits.

The Thought Emporium grows living rat neurons on an electrode array and tries to train them to play Doom. It is part of a series on biological computing.

A Veritasium video that follows the principle of least action from Bernoulli and Newton to quantum mechanics, asking whether light takes all possible paths at once. It includes experiments showing quantum waves.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains superdeterminism as an interpretation of quantum mechanics, addressing common objections and misconceptions, including the worry that it kills free will or science. She ties it to Bell's theorem and hidden variables.

Sean Carroll's Talks at Google presentation of his book Something Deeply Hidden. He gives an accessible introduction to quantum mechanics and argues for the many-worlds interpretation and the emergence of spacetime.

A 1979 CBC radio interview in which Ted Nelson tries to explain how computers could serve as tools for thinking and visualizing. The interviewer keeps failing to grasp the idea, and Nelson patiently answers again and again.

Dragan Djuric presents Clojure libraries for GPU and numerical computing, including ClojureCL, ClojureCUDA and Neanderthal. He shows how a dynamic REPL workflow can be combined with low-level hardware acceleration for machine learning and data science.

Alan Kay's 2015 talk on the power of simplicity, arguing that systems become simpler by building on more sophisticated fundamental building blocks and that big research horizons drove invention at Xerox PARC. It ranges across computing, tools and scaling software.

Mike of mikeselectricstuff shows his heavily modified old BBC Micro system in a 28-minute tour of 8-bit hardware archaeology.

A 2023 LLVM Developers' Meeting keynote by Abdul Dakkak, Chris Lattner and Jeff Niu introducing Mojo, a Python-family systems language built on MLIR and LLVM for heterogeneous computing.

A 47-minute restoration of a 1920s IBM computing cheese cutter, a machine with parts patented between 1901 and 1907. The video covers the restoration work and explains why it is a computing cheese cutter.

Bret Victor's DBX 2013 talk, delivered in the guise of a 1973 IBM engineer with an overhead projector. It surveys forgotten ideas from 1960s and early 70s computing and warns against assuming you know what you're doing.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli gives a public lecture at the Royal Institution on how our understanding of time has changed, from Boltzmann and Einstein to quantum theory and loop quantum gravity. He blends physics, philosophy and art to argue that time is stranger than everyday intuition suggests.

Episode 4 of James Burke's Connections series, tracing how commercialism, climate change and the Black Death shaped the move to the Renaissance. It follows threads through waterpower, the printing press, the Jacquard loom and the Hollerith punch card toward modern computing.

Veritasium traces analog computers from the Antikythera mechanism and Kelvin's tide-predicting machines to fire control and modern analog approaches. It explains how these machines computed continuously rather than digitally.

An Isaac Arthur episode on civilizations in the far future, past the Black Hole Era. It covers iron stars, Boltzmann brains, reversible computing and the idea of reversing entropy.

CuriousMarc powers up a vintage HP 5061A cesium beam clock and explains both the quantum principle and the HP implementation in detail. It is part of a longer atomic clock series.

Erlang co-creator Joe Armstrong's Code BEAM SF 2018 keynote revisits good ideas from the history of computing that were dropped, and asks which should be revived. It also touches on Erlang and Elixir.

David Beazley's PyData Global 2021 keynote, an oral history of early scientific Python. He tells how Python ended up running on a Connection Machine supercomputer at Los Alamos.

A 1975 live demonstration of the APL language by Imperial College professor Bob Spence, showing a REPL on a modified typewriter terminal and APL's appeal to non-programmers.

A Strange Loop 2019 talk by Aaron Cummings on the computing systems aboard Voyager 1 and 2, which control the spacecraft and record and return data decades after launch in 1977.

Clip from Lex Fridman's podcast with Roger Penrose in which Penrose argues that consciousness is not a computation. He discusses Godel-style arguments and the possible role of quantum effects in microtubules.

Ted Nelson, the originator of hypertext and Project Xanadu, gives a personal account at age 80 of his ideals, his career, and how a poor career plan led to discoveries and adventures. It works as an alternative history of personal computing and hypertext.

Jeff Geerling interviews Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton about the Pi shortage, the RP2040, RISC-V, the Sony investment and the origin of the name.

Lyle Bickley of the PDP-1 restoration team tours the 1959 DEC machine at the Computer History Museum and plays the original Spacewar! He covers its graphics display and the MIT student programs written for it.

Joe Duffy's RustConf 2017 closing keynote on his experience at Microsoft building Midori, an operating system written in a Rust-like safe systems language. He covers the technical and cultural challenges of applying those lessons to Windows.

Alan Kay's TED talk on teaching ideas, in which he argues the world is not what it seems and shows children learning through programming and building their own lessons with Etoys/Squeak.

Jose Valim introduces Nx, the project bringing numerical computing to Elixir, covering multi-dimensional tensors, automatic differentiation and JIT compilation to CPU and GPU.

A detailed 40-minute explanation of the ultraviolet catastrophe, covering Rayleigh and Jeans' classical treatment of blackbody radiation and Planck's quantum hypothesis. It follows the Eisberg and Resnick textbook treatment.

CuriousMarc and colleagues at the Computer History Museum try to compile and run a FORTRAN II program on a 1959 IBM 1401. The machine has only 16k of memory and a CPU not meant for scientific work, so success is far from guaranteed.

Marques Brownlee shares his hands-on impressions of Apple's $3500 Vision Pro headset after trying it. He covers the spatial computing experience, eye tracking, and how it compares to other devices.

David Ditzel of Esperanto Technologies presents their massively parallel, energy-efficient RISC-V processors at the 7th RISC-V Workshop in 2017. It covers the high-performance many-core design aimed at machine learning.

Jim Keller, CTO of Tenstorrent, gives a keynote at Stanford's System X conference on change, understanding and the future of computing. He touches on Moore's Law, how far transistors are from physical limits, and ideas like DNA origami.

Veritasium explains the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, drawing heavily on Sean Carroll's book. It walks through the Schrodinger equation and why wave collapse may be unnecessary if the universe keeps splitting.