Earlier this week, I gave a talk at Open Source Bridge. It was entitled What Are Computers, Really? and was, basically, an attempt to distill some of the basic ideas about computation, the Church-Turing thesis, and the existence of inherent limits to computability.

This was actually the talk I’d planned to give last year when I ended up getting really sick and losing my voice the day before my talk. Well, this time I gave it and my slides are up on GitHub.

I was pretty happy with how things turned out and, given the feedback, I think I hit a decent balance of accessible and informative.

One thing that I wasn’t entirely pleased with is that I didn’t really get to explain what corecursive programs are and what it means to be “productive”. Instead, I sorta merged terminating and productive together into “finite process” with rhetorical sleight of hand. The other slight oversimplification was with Rice’s theorem, but I don’t think I said anything badly deceitful.

In the end, though, the audience seemed to enjoy themselves, I got a lot of good questions, and I got some complements so I think it went well.

Now, I think I need to take it easy for a few days before I throw myself head long into the Next Thing.