• Question: what type of programing do you do... i didnt really understand... do you make pictures?????????????????

    Asked by raasay to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 10 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Robert Thompson

      Robert Thompson answered on 9 Mar 2012:

      Was this aimed at all of us ? I don’t do much programming, I spend too much time in front of my computer as it is. I only do computer programming to run my experiments. So basically I tell my computer how to control my experiment (eg. a robot)

    • Photo: Martin Zaltz Austwick

      Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 9 Mar 2012:

      Was this one for me? A part of what I do in my job is “visualising data” – which is basically making pictures and movies to make complicated information easier to understand.

      It’s like drawing a graph or a map, really. What I do is to write computer programs which take really complicated data (like a load of bike journeys, for example) and try to show it so it’s easy to tell what’s going on, or where you can start to see interesting patterns. Like where people are travelling most often.

      Of course, that’s just one part of it – then there’s maths for saying more specific things about the pretty pictures! Like, “how many people are cycling from South London to North London”, or “how far are they going” or “how many people cycle over a typical weekend”…

    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 9 Mar 2012:

      Sometimes the maths is too complicated to do just with pen and paper. Sometimes it’s just the size of the problem (trying to work out the solutions to a few thousand equations) but some problems can’t be solved at all without a computer.

      One example, in my work we have an equation for what an atom is doing for different times. I program some code to solve this equation for lots of times very close together. Then I can make a picture of these solutions that show that as time passes something in the system increases or decreases, and this can tell us a lot about what’s going on. If I tried to do this without a computer it would take months, or even years. With a computer it takes 5 minutes. We have some data that has to run on a supercomputer for weeks to get the answers, so we’d never be able to do that ourselves.

      Another type of problem I use a computer for is optimisation. This is when we’re looking for the optimal (or best) path for something. Like trying to find the shortest route through a city centre. The computer can try out thousands of different routes and pick out the fastest one very quickly and accurately.

    • Photo: James Boone

      James Boone answered on 9 Mar 2012:

      I mainly use a programming language called Fortran, which has been around for years, but has stood the test of time! I use Fortran mainly to manipulate thousands of position coordinates to create models of defects. For example, one really cool defect that I generate is a fold in graphite. It would simply take too long to apply really long equations thousands of times by hand but a computer does it faster than you can blink!

    • Photo: Marcus Gallagher-Jones

      Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      I also don’t do too much programming. Mainly it is just various packages that can reconstruct 2D and 3D images from a pattern they produce during there exposure to X-rays known as a speckle pattern. The tricky thing is the kind of imaging I do is not in ‘real-space’ but ‘reciprocal space’ (1/space if you will). To get an image from our data we need to perform certain calculations over and over again so a computer is the best way of doing this.

Comments