Library branch

Engineering

Turning principles into tools. This room is still empty.

18 pieces

Tool The Binary Board — Counting with Eight Switches Eight switches to flip yourself. Press +1 and watch the carry happen; build a target number; see your own name become a row of on and off. Knowing by reading and knowing by pressing are different things. Tool The Qubit Board — A Switch Neither On Nor Off Four boards in order: tilt a qubit, half-turn it, bind two together, and finally find the treasure among four boxes the quantum way, in a single look. Every press explains what you just saw.

What Does a Computer Know? A Computer Knows Nothing At All The computer showing you this page cannot read it. It knows exactly two things: on and off. And with those two things, it got this far. 1 questions
What Does a Computer Know? Why 0 and 1, of All Things? We count in tens because we have ten fingers. A computer, in effect, has two. But the real reason computers count in twos is not mathematics — it is sturdiness. 1 questions
What Does a Computer Know? How to Speak to a Machine The phrase 'computer language' sounds like something made for machines. It is the opposite. The machine understands exactly one thing — numeric orders — and every programming language was built for humans to read. And the first program was written before any computer existed. 2 questions
What Does a Computer Know? How the Calculator Became a Computer A calculator is a machine that adds. What is a computer a machine for? The answer: nothing in particular. The decisive invention was not a part but a thought — that orders, like data, can be loaded and swapped. 2 questions
What Does a Computer Know? What Happens in One Click Tap the screen and the app appears — a tenth of a second, less than a yawn. Inside it, the computer works through hundreds of millions of orders, one at a time, in sequence. Everything that looks simultaneous is an illusion. 1 questions
What Does a Computer Know? Why the Drawing Chip Became the Brain A part built to draw game screens now runs AI, folds proteins and forecasts weather. Not by accident: drawing and those calculations turned out to share one shape — a simple job, millions of times over, all at once. 1 questions
What Does a Computer Know? How Does an AI Learn? We never teach a child a cat by rules; we just show cats. Can a machine that only does what it is told be taught that way too? It can — and even its makers cannot fully explain what it ends up knowing. 1 questions
What Does a Computer Know? The Cloud Is Actually a Building We 'upload photos to the cloud'. Where in the cloud? There is no cloud. The photo sits in a computer inside some building. 'Cloud' is a pretty word for someone else's computer. The series closes with that building, and the road to it. 1 questions
What Does a Computer Know? From Sand to Switch — The Semiconductor What are piece one's tens of billions of switches made of, and how? The material is sand. The method is not carving but printing with light. Why a semiconductor is 'semi', why ultraviolet, and why smaller is running out. 1 questions
What Does a Computer Know? Where Memory Lives — DRAM and HBM Today's computers do not jam on calculation. They jam on fetching memory. Why computer memory is a bucket that never stops leaking, and why HBM — those buckets stacked upward beside the processor — became the key part of the AI age. 1 questions
What Does a Computer Know? The Quantum Computer — A Switch That Is Neither On Nor Off This series opened with 'a computer knows two things, on and off' and closed by saying that never changed. A machine that breaks that sentence is now being built. What it means for a bit to move by probability, and what that machine can and cannot do. 3 questions
Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here CDMA — How Everyone Can Speak at Once Without Mixing Twenty people take calls in one subway carriage and none of the voices mix. Why not? The method first put into commercial service in Daedeok does not divide the room at all — it lets everyone speak at once and gives each of them a different way of speaking. It is also a story about the difference between inventing something and being the first to make it work. 3 questions
Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here Nuri — What Exactly Did We Get Over? The previous article said a rocket buys speed, not height. What does the machine that makes that speed look like? Why it must carry its own oxygen, why four engines are strapped together, why it flies south from Goheung — and what made it different from the rocket before it. 2 questions
Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here Robots — Winning at Chess but Unable to Pick Up a Cup A robot calculates better than we do and beats us at chess. Ask it to fetch a cup from an unfamiliar kitchen and it cannot — a task any five-year-old manages. Difficulty here is inverted, and understanding why shows what the mechanical engineering institute in Daejeon is wrestling with. 3 questions
Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here Solar Cells and Hydrogen — Energy Is Never Made Most power stations boil water. Coal, gas, nuclear — all end in steam turning blades. A solar cell turns nothing at all. Why is it the exception? And why is hydrogen called a fuel when it cannot be dug up? These are the two things the energy institute in Daejeon is working on. 3 questions
Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here So the Artificial Sun Boils a Kettle — How a Hundred Million Degrees Becomes Electricity We keep hearing that a hundred million degrees was held for so many seconds. Nobody says what turns that heat into electricity. The answer is a little deflating: it boils water. And hidden in that deflating answer is the most awkward question in the field — does more electricity come out than went in? 2 questions
In the Making — Things Not Yet Settled A Quantum Computer Will Solve Everything — How Much of That Is True? Every cipher broken, new drugs pouring out, problems no supercomputer can touch finally cracked. If you have sat through five explanations of quantum computing and still do not get it, the fault is not the explanation but a premise that was wrong all along. A quantum computer is not a machine that solves anything faster. It is fast only at problems where the wrong answers can be made to cancel each other out. Put that one line first and the rest falls into place. 2 questions
In the Making — Things Not Yet Settled AI Is a Power Hog — So What Is the Answer? One data centre, they say, uses as much electricity as a city; in a few years, as much as a whole country. That is broadly true. But once you see why it eats so much, the answer splits three ways: make more, make it eat less, or use less. All three are being built in Daejeon. 2 questions

Routes through this branch

What Does a Computer Know? →Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here →In the Making — Things Not Yet Settled →