Computerphile

Whenever we're setting up to record a video we ask a question to get the contributor to talk so we can check their microphone is working and set a level for recording. Traditionally, people ask 'what did you have for breakfast?' - we ask something different each year!

Newcomb's Problem is a thought experiment which, on the surface, seems obvious, but what if you're trying it out on your identical twin? Which choice is best? Aric Floyd demonstrates it, then tries it on Anthropic's Claude, which doesn't always play ball!

Build your own passkey system like Mike!

When the 3D dataset is too small to create models of frogs on stilts we have to think of a different way - Lewis Stuart is based at the University of Nottingham and explains how you can use 2D diffusion to create 3D models.

Breaking the network layer model into pieces, starting top-down, Richard G Clegg of Queen Mary University London explains the 'bargain bucket' of networking!

Demonstrating that you can filter data to smooth out the numbers, but whether it's weather data, stock market information or Taylor Swift, the math is the same! David Domminney Fowler takes us through it.

Following a report on the situation with Social Media and bots, Lewis Stuart of University of Nottingham is inspired to see just how easy it is to fire up his own botnet and puts them to work on a fake social media site: 'scroll hole.'

A checksum that's robust & trivial to compute with Matt Godbolt

Signal processing is just mathematics, so lets code a guitar sound in C. Dave Domminney Fowler continues the Digital Signal Processing conversation to show how your favourite tunes all rely on DSP.

When considering how things connect together in a network, time can be an extremely important factor. Dr Richard G Clegg of Queen Mary University London takes us through networks using Page rank and Lord of the Rings.

Haptics, often associated with video game controllers, are systems that provide a touch sensation for users, but how do we calculate the forces involved? Associate Professor of Robotics and Autonomous Systems Dr Ayse Kucukyilmaz is based at the University of Nottingham.

Prepping for Post-Quantum, Mike Pound explains why now!

If you run out of headroom with your chosen sample rate, how do you avoid the problems of unwanted harmonics? - Dave Domminney Fowler explains how oversampling can help.

B is the forerunner to C - but seemed lost - Angelo Papenhoff decided to change it and brought it back from the brink! Here he tries to recreate Brian Kernighan's original 'Hello World' with a few wrinkles!

When you're setting your hardware design out using automated tools is essential, but what if the tools themselves have bugs in them? John P Wickerson is based at Imperial College London.

The PDP1 was a groundbreaking computer from the 1950's - but where does it fit into computing history and how would you use it? Thanks to Angelo Papenhoff from "Obsolescence Guaranteed" for demonstrating the PiDP1 emulator!

This video is about how Weak Memory Concurrency can cause multiple threads to do unexpected things!

Long division can be arduous - division in general is something that even computer processors try to avoid with a simple technique. Matt Godbolt demos it and then shows how a simple C program can cause a compiler to employ this trick.

Knuth talked about "Literate Programming" over forty years ago, but what does it mean to have code that a developer and a client can agree on? Dr Robert Chatley of Imperial College London demonstrates how it might work.

Fuzzing is a technique to find programming bugs by testing with random inputs - but there are smarter ways to go about it! Professor Alastair F Donaldson leads the Multicore Programming research group at Imperial College.

Continuing the deep dive down the network stack, Richard begins the story of TCP. Richard G Clegg is based at Queen Mary University London.

Network Basics story continues with the second part of the TCP segment. Richard G Clegg is based at Queen Mary University London.

With the UK planning to follow Australia in a ban on social media for under 16s, we ask how it might work? Dr Mike Pound is an Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham.

Clever Hans was a horse that could do maths, or was it using some other trick? Is AI music classification working like a 'Clever Hans?'

After changes to pricing structures for LLM powered code assistants, Mike looks at how a seemingly simple task can burn through tokens when an agent 'looks after it' for you.

We brought a computer scientist and a physicist together to talk about Shor's algorithm - a famous factorisation algorithm for that can break some currently used encryption techniques if implemented in the quantum realm.