The chances are good (since you're reading a blog about PhD research) you're at least vaguely familiar with the excellent xkcd webcomic, and you may know that the creator recently started producing books of labelled diagrams of various types described entirely with only the thousand most-common used words in the English language. If you're not familiar, check this out first. If you are, you'll be delighted to know there's now a simple filter that you can use to try your hand at the art of minimalist explanation. I attempted to explain my research. Here's what I came up with:
My work, using only the the ten hundred most used words in our language: "I am a computer using person, and I work on writing computer-words to make small flying machines (with no person doing the flying) fly around. I want them to fly in a not-stupid way so that if there is a bad event in the world, they can make a group of flying machines and look all over the place where the bad-event happened to find people who are in trouble. They need to be not-stupid so that they find the people quickly, or they might die. It is hard to do because they only have little computers on them and so can't do hard number-work, and they can only talk to other flying machines a little bit (and not all the time). Sometimes there might be a map of where people are and where bad-things are, and we can use this map to help the flying-machines go to the best places where there are people in trouble."
No comments:
Post a Comment