• Question: What is your favourite piece of work

    Asked by anon-254854 to Adam on 18 May 2020. This question was also asked by anon-256832.
    • Photo: Adam Baskerville

      Adam Baskerville answered on 18 May 2020:

      Thank you for the great question! One of my favourite pieces of work was solving a very complex mathematical equation, which needed to be evaluated over 2,000,000,000,000,000 times requiring 200 decimal digits of precision. If you did 1 calculation every second it would take 63,419,583 years to solve! I wrote a highly optimised computer code that used all the cores of the Central Processing Unit (CPU) along with a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) that solved it in 4 hours. I get a real buzz from optimising and simplifying very difficult problems to make them solvable on a human time scale.

Comments

  • Photo: Chris

    Chris commented on :

    Interesting question! I think for me it was writing a program and making a system to interact with one of our very old lasers (it was made in something like the 1970s), it had everything, bit of coding, bit of soldering and getting in the workshop to machine the casing to hold everything in. And it actually worked!