Presented by Igor Wiedler @igorwhiletrue

Presented on April 17, 2014

As developers, we compute. But what is computation exactly? And why is it so difficult to write correct software? Alan Turing and Alonzo Church discovered some remarkable answers to these questions in 1936. They envisioned abstract machines before real computers even existed. Those abstract machines would model all of the computable things.

In this talk, we will discover the possibilities and limitations of computation. Along the way we will encounter a bunch of virtual machines and interpreters, see similarities between them, and how they relate to things that we use every day, such as regular expressions, parsers, the PHP interpreter itself. You will gain a deeper understanding of what computation is, and what programming is all about.

Tags: Virtual,machine,computation