• Question: whats coding?

    Asked by anon-268330 to Pratik on 13 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Pratik Samant

      Pratik Samant answered on 13 Nov 2020:

      Computers don’t speak the same language as us. So we need a way to give them instructions so that they understand what to do. This is essentially what code is, and there’s many different languages in which you can code (C++, Java, Python, Julia, etc.).

      So I spend a lot of my time writing scripts (which are sets of instructions for a computer) for my computer to interpret. This is the bulk of how I can get computers to learn things with machine learning, I write some script to tell it what to learn and how to learn it. I then use these scripts to see if the computer can solve the problems I want it to solve.

Comments

  • Photo: Joshua

    Joshua commented on :

    Computers, like laptops and mobile phones, are general computing machines. If they are given a set of precise instructions they can carry out a massive range of different tasks, this ranges from calculating statistics and plotting graphs to running video games or browsing the web.

    Lots of scientists ‘code’ ie write their own software to do calculations for them. I write code that takes electrical signals from MRI scanners and makes images of your body for doctors to use. But software is written to do a massive range of tasks.

  • Photo: Andreas

    Andreas commented on :

    Computers use a set of predefined commands or codes. Many of these are pretty simple, like “add 1 to the number that I keep over there”. It’s the combination of these commands into an algorithm that is powerful. I create computer code to figure out from which particles all the thousands of tracks in the Large Hadron Collider came from.
    Coding is also used to write fun computer games. You can have a try here: https://scratch.mit.edu/