Notes on understanding computation.
FLOPS - floating point operation.
Does it all really come down to arithmetic? If you can represent an image with numbers (pixel data, number for RGB) then transforming that image is really just transforming numbers – arithmetic.
Words are “numbers” too, 0-255 [letters, accents, etc.].
We learn to represent our thoughts as “data” then do arithmetic on that data. Even very complex ideas like matching up pairs of words – under the hood, it’s really matching up numbers. (Equality!)
Programming is:
- Figuring out how to represent your idea as data
- Figuring out how to transform that data into more meaningful data
We start walking up the abstraction stream. We don’t think with letters, or words, but concepts. But eventually it gets reduced to these operations.
FLOPS - floating point operations per second. How much arithmetic can you do is how much computation you can do (and everything reduces to arithmetic, more or less. It’s just amazing to think about.)
Drill in… image, numbers, screen which reads numbers and sets pixels. Video: sequence of images to show. Audio: sequence of sound waves [as numbers] to generate.