Tom Kilburn: A Tale of Five Computers

One of the preeminent figures in the early history of computer design was Tom Kilburn. Over the course of some 30 years, he made significant contributions to the development of five historically significant computers. Although a natural team leader possessed of a somewhat dominating personality, who inspired in those who worked closely with him great loyalty and affection, Kilburn was, on casual acquaintance, a self-contained man who chose his words with care. Tom Kilburn was born August 11, 1921, in West Yorkshire, England. His father, John William Kilburn, was a statistical clerk who rose to become a company secretary.13Tom had a somewhat specialized education at Wheelwright Grammar School having been permitted by his headmaster to study almost nothing else from around the age of 14. It was hardly surprising therefore he emerged from school as something of a mathematical specialist. In 1940, Kilburn went Sidney Sussex College, in Cambridge, with several scholarships. Wartime courses at Cambridge were somewhat truncated and in 1942, Kilburn graduated with First Class Honors in Part I of the Mathematical Tripos and in the preliminary examination for Part II

The preliminary design of bearings for the control system of a high-temperature lithium-cooled nuclear reactor

The design of bearings for the control system of a fast reactor concept is presented. The bearings are required to operate at temperatures up to 2200 F in one of two fluids, lithium or argon. Basic bearing types are the same regardless of the fluid. Crowned cylindrical journals were selected for radially loaded bearings and modified spherical bearings were selected for bearings under combined thrust and radial loads. Graphite and aluminum oxide are the materials selected for the argon atmosphere bearings while cermet compositions (carbides or nitrides bonded with refractory metals) were selected for the lithium lubricated bearings. Mounting of components is by shrink fit or by axial clamping utilizing differential thermal expansion

Aspects of command language portability incorporating a machine-independent filestore concept

A brief summary of job control language development precedes a general discussion of possible improvements in command language practice. The user requirements of a command language are considered with special reference to a machine independent basis. "Primitive" functions are defined from this viewpoint. To meet the proposed objective of portability it is suggested that an appreciation of the user interaction with the computer operating system is necessary. This provides the definition of the user profile model based on the user requirements of a command language. A second model is then developed to represent the structure of the operating system. [Continues.

A tensor-based selection hyper-heuristic for cross-domain heuristic search

Hyper-heuristics have emerged as automated high level search methodologies that manage a set of low level heuristics for solving computationally hard problems. A generic selection hyper-heuristic combines heuristic selection and move acceptance methods under an iterative single point-based search framework. At each step, the solution in hand is modified after applying a selected heuristic and a decision is made whether the new solution is accepted or not. In this study, we represent the trail of a hyper-heuristic as a third order tensor. Factorization of such a tensor reveals the latent relationships between the low level heuristics and the hyper-heuristic itself. The proposed learning approach partitions the set of low level heuristics into two subsets where heuristics in each subset are associated with a separate move acceptance method. Then a multi-stage hyper-heuristic is formed and while solving a given problem instance, heuristics are allowed to operate only in conjunction with the associated acceptance method at each stage. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time tensor analysis of the space of heuristics is used as a data science approach to improve the performance of a hyper-heuristic in the prescribed manner. The empirical results across six different problem domains from a benchmark indeed indicate the success of the proposed approach

Investigate and classify various types of computer architecture

Issued as Final report, Project no. G-36-60

The Use of American and British Lexis in Brunei English

In pronunciation, influenced by American English, a shift in Brunei English can be observed in the increasing use of [r] in tokens such as car and heard particularly among younger speakers whose pronunciation may be influenced by American English. In contrast, older speakers tend to omit the [r] sound in these tokens as their pronunciation may be more influenced by British English. However, it is unclear whether American English has influenced the vocabulary of Brunei English speakers as the education system in Brunei favours British English due to its historical ties with Britain. This paper analyses the use of American and British  lexical items between three age groups: 20 in-service teachers aged between 29 to 35 years old, 20 university undergraduates aged between 19 to 25 years old, and 20 secondary school students who are within the 11 to 15 age range. Each age group has 10 female and 10 male participants and they were asked to name seven objects shown to them on Power point slides. Their responses were recorded and compared between the age groups and between female and male data. The analysis is supplemented with recorded data from interviews with all 60 participants to determine instances of American and British lexical items in casual speech. It was found that there is a higher occurrence of American than British lexical items in all three groups and the interview data supports the findings in the main data. Thus, providing further evidence for the Americanisation of Brunei English and that Brunei English is undergoing change