Epic fantasy is a genre near and dear to many hearts. Ever since some Mesopotamian guys realized that a story about a manly man fighting gods was really cool, humans have been telling tales of larger-than-life characters in magical worlds. Fictional characters like Gilgamesh, Thor, Jesus Christ, and Barack Obama had adventures so cool that we still remember them today. Modern epic fantasy is largely inspired by The Hobbit and the other works of Jolkin, Rolkin, Rolkin Tolkien. It typically takes place in a fictional world filled with humans, elves, dwarves, and other races as they fight against some sort of dark lord who wants to destroy the world and or conquer it. There will be magic, gigantic armies crashing into each other with no thoughts to tactics, and heroic-chosen ones doing heroic stuff. Sometimes people come up to me and say, James, how do I write an epic fantasy story? And I'll usually respond with, Who are you and why are you in my bathroom? After I've determined whether or not to call the police, I'll tell them that as the unrivaled expert in writing fantasy that I am, there are eight major things that you have to include if you want to create the greatest epic fantasy ever written. Number one, put in a prophecy, ideally at the beginning. The first few paragraphs of your book should be in italics, signifying that it's not actually part of the real story. This is the part where you'll explain the plot to the reader. The dark lord rose long ago, was defeated, and now he'll come back and a chosen one will beat him for good. You can't just say that though. You have to put the prophecy in some more... fancy language. Say something like, when the moon shines brightest, the darkness shall rise, the falcon sun shall be your salvation, that sort of thing. Don't forget to mention the chosen one's sword or his girlfriend. It's impossible to be epic without including a romance in there somewhere. Everyone in the world should be aware of the dark lord and the prophecy of the chosen one, except for the chosen one himself. That way they can all explain it to him and to the audience at the same time. And there has to be a dark lord too. You should never put in a new threat for the heroes to face. Fantasy isn't a genre for creativity and new ideas, it's a genre for following strict conventions set out before us. You might be thinking that the dark lord being beaten once already would make him seem less threatening and detract from the narrative tension, since, you know, he's been beaten before, we can do it again. You would be wrong. And since prophecies in this world are always 100% accurate, all the heroes have to do is find the chosen one and they're good. After all, waiting for a magical teenage boy to come and solve all your problems is a great way to figure out everything from economic woes to ethnic conflict. If you don't want to put in the prophecy at the beginning, then just don't tell the audience what it says at all. Have the wise old mentor character tell the chosen one that he's the chosen one and that he'll defeat the dark lord and then you're done. Saves you the trouble of having to write some purple prose. Number two, make sure there's incest. If recent epic fantasy hits like George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones or Scasa Fushimi's Oreno Imoto Gakona Nikawa Iwake Genai have taught us anything, it's that epic fantasy is incomplete without some incest. If you want to show one of your bad guys being deviant and grotesque, just have him... his sister. If you want to show one of the good guys angst over a forbidden love, just have him want to... his sister. This is what's known as character development. Remember in the fifth sorceress when it was revealed that the villain's plan was to make Tristan and his sister create an army of magical inbreds to repopulate the world? That was everyone's favorite part of that very successful and well-received novel.  They're clearly just afraid of your artistic genius and are attempting to censor you. The solution is just to power on through and ignore all criticisms. However, if you're some sort of coward that caves into pressure, you could always make them step siblings or something. People seem to think that it's not incest if they aren't blood related. Number three, use the prologue in the opening chapter to dump exposition. I've already mentioned that you need to put the prophecy up front, but right after the prophecy you need to have a prologue showing some of the characters doing mysterious stuff. Ideally, this will take place right after the Dark Lord was defeated the first time, featuring some of the previous heroes. They need to exchange some cryptic dialogue about how they can't believe they defeated him and how they're glad it will never happen again. Then have them show off some sort of artifact that will be important later, like the chosen one's sword or the piece of jewelry that contains the Dark Lord's soul. If the first conflict with the Dark Lord came hundreds or thousands of years before the main story begins, some readers might think it's odd for the technology level to be exactly the same. If these guys were swinging around steel swords 3,000 years ago, isn't it conceivable that they could have gunpowder weapons or even spaceflight by now? The correct response to this is to tell them to go read something un-epic and something written for casual readers, because obviously they don't like epic fantasy, okay, read something casual like Dune. However, if you don't want to make a prologue that gives away too much of the backstory, it could take place right before the main story starts, with some more modern characters realizing that the Dark Lord is about to rise again. Have some random soldiers come across a camp of orcs only to be killed immediately while thinking about the threat that they pose. Make sure that all the characters we follow die. They might be able to help the chosen one in his quest if they live, and we want to keep the stakes high. After the prologue, jump into the first chapter where you'll show the chosen one living his life as a farmer in a forest peasant village. Here's where you need to throw in all your exposition about the village, the kingdom it's situated in, the political situation, the rumors of orcs attacking some other far-off area, and how the chosen one is definitely not anything other than a simple farm boy. Make sure that all the information is given to the reader in the form of long, unbroken paragraphs. Or better yet, have the characters in the village give each other this information that they should already know in the form of monologues. I heard a rumor that there have been orc raids out east. It's true.  They still occasionally attack now and again, but they're split into hundreds of different kin groups known as Molak Otis, which expend much of their energy fighting each other. In addition, the noble order of the Eastern Knights guards the border zealously, but ever since King Roderick ascended to the throne, he's refused to send them the aid that they require, and thus the border has become more porous. But what if you want to put the chosen one somewhere other than an isolated forest village? Well, you could put him in a city, and if he lives there, he should be an orphan who lives in the slums and only survives by stealing. This is a setting you go for if you want to make the chosen one dark and edgy for the first 50 pages before he decides to become the perfect hero. If you want to put him in another setting, don't. Number four, the world has to be like medieval Europe. Just like in The Hobbit, the world needs to be based on Europe from a thousand years ago, with similar cultures, climates, architecture, warfare, and social structure. No need to pick up a real history book and learn about the minutiae of medieval life, though. Just go based off of what you've seen in movies and video games. The main difference is that your world will have elves, dwarves, and another race. Dwarves are easy. They're just short humans who like to mine. For more detail, you can give them beards and axes, and maybe a Scottish accent. Elves are a little different. They're just humans who have pointy ears and live in trees.  And despite being immortal, they keep to themselves and refuse to help the heroes do much, since if they did, their magic powers of evil smiting would solve the plot instantly. If anyone asks why the elves haven't conquered all the other races by now, uh, orcs are a savage people who just like to attack and destroy stuff without ever building anything of their own. These guys will have to be the Dark Lord's minions, because they're evil, and he's evil, and as we all know, people devoted solely to death and destruction get along great with one another. If you don't want to have orcs, then just put in a new race that acts exactly the same as them, but has a different name. Some people will pick up on it, but if any of them bring it up, all you have to do is release a YouTube video where you explain that they're actually totally different because the orcs are tall and your urcanips are short. Remember that all races are only allowed one culture and language apiece, except for humans because we're special. Don't deter from what Tolkien did in the slightest. He was perfect and his work should never be used as a foundation to build something different. Basically, just do what the guy who wrote Aragon did. Everyone loved that book. Number five, the lead and the love interest have to fall in love at first sight. The best part of epic fantasy is the stellar realism that exists on every page, and that extends to the character relationships as well. When the chosen one sets out on his quest, he has to come across a beautiful woman about his age. Be sure to describe her as impossibly beautiful, the most beautiful woman in the world, or else the audiences won't get it. Make her a princess too, but not a boring realistic princess who's engaged to her cousin in order to solidify her father's alliance with another kingdom.  The princess refuses to be a damsel in distress, but you can't let her upstage the hero, so make sure she never defeats any important villains. Just mooks that the heroes run into now and then. When she comes across a more powerful villain, make sure she gets captured so that the hero can angst about it. The chosen one and the princess should fall in love the instant they see each other, just like in real life. They need to profess their love and become devoted to one another as soon as possible, and the princess has to leave her home to go on this quest with him. This is the one part of the story where incest isn't allowed. I know, sorry folks, you're disappointed, I know. As the story goes on, don't forget to mention that their love is deep and profound at every opportunity, if not one of the most deep and profound loves to ever exist. Audiences forget things if you don't bring them up every seven pages. Not to mention that teenage love is known for being very mature and long-lasting. Some of you might be thinking, wait, what if the chosen one is a girl? Well, if you're thinking that, then send me your address so I can come burn your house down. Number six, make everything super dark. Murder, kidnapping people and forcing them into slavery, burning down orphanages with the orphans inside, and other delightful family activities should be front and center in your epic fantasy. Want to show the how evil the Dark Lord is? Just make him a r- Better yet, have him attempt one of the female heroes before the protagonist saves her at the last second.  If anyone claims that you're just writing this as some sort of fetish fuel, just remember that their accusation is completely true, and if you're writing a light novel, that goes double. Of course, nothing bad can actually happen to the main characters, so it might be better to just have all this occur off-screen to nameless characters. Have the chosen one ride into a peasant village after it's been destroyed by the Dark Lord's forces. Be sure to describe all the horrors inflicted in vivid detail, like an episode of Criminal Minds if it was directed by Jeffrey Dahmer. Remember, it's not exploitative if it's historically accurate, just like that HBO documentary series, A Game of Thrones. Wait. Wait, maybe we should cut that part out. Number seven, have a bunch of POV characters. The thing that makes a story epic is having a gigantic cast of characters. It doesn't matter if they're deep or likable, it doesn't matter if they affect the plot in any meaningful way either. Since, as we've established, the plot should be explained up front by the prophecy. We need a bunch of different points of view to showcase how cool the chosen ones' powers are. The minimum number of POV characters for a successful epic fantasy is 18. You can go higher if you want, but you have to have at least 18. If you have less, then by the time the reader gets 20 pages in, they'll pick up on how un-epic the story is and they'll rush off to give it a one-star review on Goodreads. This is science backed up by studies performed at the University of Oxford. If you can't think of 18 characters then you should reconsider attempting this whole writing thing and maybe go on to some failure career like accounting or computer programming. But, since this is a writing advice video, I'll give you some ideas for characters. There's the chosen one, his love interest, the best friend who tags along for comedic relief, the wise mentor who tells him about the prophecy and is most likely a wizard, the Dark Lord, the Dark Lord's servant who wants to help him destroy the world even though he would kill him, the love interest best friend, the king of the good kingdom who is secretly the chosen one's father, his servant who turns out to be a traitor, the grizzled old soldier, and that's all that I'll give you since you have to do at least some of the work here on your own. Number eight, make the Dark Lord the only important villain. I've already mentioned that the Dark Lord is the main villain of the story and that the chosen one is prophesized to defeat him even though he was defeated once already. The Dark Lord will have some servants in the world that perform his bidding. If he's dead they'll be the ones to perform the complex ritual to resurrect him. If he's imprisoned they'll be the ones to search for the keys to free him. The Dark Lord can never actually come back and fight the characters though. He has to stay in the background as more of an event that the characters must stop than a character himself. With the Dark Lord away you must, and I repeat, you must resist the urge to make his minions into more developed characters. You might have the urge to give them complex motivations for wanting to free the Dark Lord, even knowing that they'll die afterwards. You might think that this would make them more interesting or more sympathetic, giving them a different flavor and making the story stand out a bit more when in reality it'll just hurt the reader's heads. People can't handle any sort of moral ambiguity in their media. Okay, that part, I'm not even being sarcastic there. People generally do have a very difficult time with that. For that matter, you may be tempted to release the Dark Lord and have the heroes fight him for real. Obviously, this is impossible.  Not that he's a metaphor for anything, of course. If he represented some large societal problem like climate change or war, then people might think that your epic fantasy story is sending the message that we should just ignore our problems and hope that they go away, or hope that someone else solves them. We wouldn't want that. And that's it. If you can follow all those steps, then you'll be well on your way to making the greatest epic fantasy story of all time. Some people might say that the quality is based off things like pros and execution, or by being original. No. I'd like to thank Christopher Hawkins, Joseph Pendergraft, Melanie Austin, and all my other patrons for making this possible. And Oppo Savalainen. I hope I said that right. I don't think I'd be able to experiment with different video types if y'all weren't helping me out, so seriously, it means a lot. If you want early access to videos and the ability to vote on what I do next, as well as getting your name put in here, then go to my page and donate. It's only a dollar a month. And be sure to smash the like button, that subscribe button, and watch all my other contents. Please, I need food. And no publishers want to buy my writing for some reason. Bye.


Thank you, thank you for the introduction. So a lot of the talks that have been in today's room have been about PCB design tools and things like that. We're going to go even lower than that. We're going to talk about building chips, ASICs with open-source tools. OpenPetan is not a open-source CAD tool, but it is being used by a lot of open-source CAD tools right now as the test suite for that. So what is OpenPetan? Well, OpenPetan is the world's first open-source general-purpose multi-threaded mini-core, but when you think about it, it's really a best-of-breed mini-core architecture design where you have lots of different cores, general-purpose cores that you can put together, all written in Verilog HDL and all open-source. So our design, the core of it, or sorry, not the core, the most of it is BST license, and one of the cores is GPL and some of the other cores are Soderpad. But we can actually eat in lots of different cores now. So now we actually have 10 different core types, microprocessor core types, excuse me, with four different instruction set architectures. It was designed to be scalable. So it scales up to about a half billion cores, but I don't really recommend actually trying to build that. But the secret sauce here is that you can actually have a configurable and cache coherent interface where you can hook together lots of cores in a, well, I'll show some pictures of this in a 2D mesh design and build very large chips. It's all open-source, so you can use this in your open-source CAD tools and in fact, I will be talking about the end of today's talk, that there is a big movement now for open-source EDA hardware tools, and they're using OpenPetan as the development tests for that, and I'll talk a little bit about that. Some other sort of things as I said, sort of chip level, we've actually built some of these chips and I'll talk about that in a second. But from a simulation perspective, we support all the commercial and open-source simulators these days for Verilog. So we have Icarus Verilog and Verilator are some of the two most popular open-source EDA Verilog simulators these days. This design has been ASIC verified and FPGA verified, and we'll talk about that in a second. And we've done very careful power analysis on the actual ASIC we've built and cross-referenced that with the open-source design, so you can go and use that to make sure your tools, your EDA tools are doing the right thing. Because that's really important is you want to have sort of a design reference of maybe something that may have went through a commercial tool and see if that actually you're getting good quality results or some of that from this whole thing. And I should also say this runs full-stack Davion Linux, it's a full working many-core design. We've built chips with 25 cores, we can scale up to many, many more cores. So that's OpenPetan. Well, we took OpenPetan and we extended it and started adding more cores. The original OpenPetan actually used an open spark core, so spark so open instruction set that the old Sun systems used to use, and Sun had open-source that at some point. And now we've extended it, risk five is sort of becoming hot these days, so we wanted to add in sort of risk five support. Because in reality, OpenPetan, we don't really care that much about the core, we care much more about the uncore and building a scalable uncore. So we took in a collaboration with ETH Zurich and the pulp team and integrated the Arian core. So the Arian core is a general purpose 64-bit risk five processor, which we've integrated in collaboration with ETH Zurich and the pulp team, as I said before. And what was especially really kind of cool about this is we were able to do this integration and it took us less than six months from the time we started integrating our registered transfer language Verilog code to the point where we actually had working design in FPGA booting SMP Linux. So these are silicon proven designs and that's something you really need if you're gonna go build and use your open-source CAD tool is, you know, is this real designs, is it not just synthetic designs? I'll talk a little bit about synthetic designs in a second of why that's not really great for using for your CAD tools. So what are the sort of chips we've built? Well, we built the PTOM processor at Princeton, which is a 25-core, many-core implementation of this. It uses three on-chip networks, a directory-based cache coherence system. This was taped out in IBM's 32-nanometer process a few years back and it was about 460 million transistors which is one of the largest academic chips ever built. At ETH Zurich, the Arian team has taped out a couple different variants, one named Poseidon, one named Cosmodrome, where Arian shows up as processors used in the ETH Zurich work and now we're actually working to build chips together and we're gonna be taping out this year some open PTOM plus Arian designs in a 12-nanometer process. So as I said, you wanna not just target or be a good open-source design just for ASIC design, you also wanna be good for the FPGA world. So we map to a bunch of different FPGAs and we've shown this, so we have things from sort of one, two cores and relatively inexpensive boards all the way up to many cores or, well, 12 cores in sort of quite expensive boards. And the other thing that we've been talking about recently and have done recently is we now have this on Amazon F1. So in Amazon AWS or Amazon Web Services, you can rent a FPGA in the cloud for about a dollar or 60 an hour. I don't know what it is in the European world if they have actually the F1 instances that might just be in the States, but you can use those and rent it and then you don't need to own a $8,000 test board to go do this, you can go rent some $1.60 an hour prorated board, which then you can go use and actually develop and sort of test out these types of things. Okay, so what's sort of the design system here in open PTOM? As I said, it's a 2D mesh structure, so each of these things is a tile. Inside of a tile, we have a network on chip routers, let me zoom in here for a second. So we have three routers, we have a slice of a last level shared cache with a directory, and then we have a private cache and we have the core here. And then we have a lot of off chip chipset stuff, which is actually really helpful if you're trying to go build a CAD tool, you don't just want cores and you just don't want interconnect, you want sort of everything to go test your CAD tool. So we've got a lot of feedback from people who are using this, that they actually want the variety of all the things that you could possibly sort of put together. So this is sort of the open PTOM system. Nowadays we're doing open PTOM plus Arianne, so literally we just sort of took open PTOM, or sorry, took the open Spark core, ripped it out and put in the Arianne core. And there's a lot of work that went into that, it's not quite as easy just ripping it out and putting it in. But we have a paper coming out together with the ETH-Zeruk team at ASPLUS in two months where we talk a lot about how to go do that and build the infrastructure where you can plug in lots of different core types, which are vastly different. Okay, so this brings me up to the sort of CAD world here. So we've heard a lot about EDA tools for PCBs. What's the state of the art sort of in the chip world? Well, they're used, but maybe not anyone's actually sort of taping out chips right now with that. And that's sad, in my opinion. And what's missing? Well, we've had a lot of tools from academic groups for verification, we have open source flow for some very small FPGAs these days. But in reality, we want to sort of get to the point where we can tape out large chips, least academic chips, or maybe commercial chips with a full open source EDA tool flow and for the chip side. So when people have traditionally tested these things, they have a lot of times been using sort of old industrial designs to go do their test. And one of the things, or they're using old academic designs. And one of the biggest problems here is they're really limited in scale. So if you go look at sort of the designs out there that people have used traditionally to test EDA tools in academia, they're using sort of example designs, or they're using very small designs, or they're using obfuscated designs that are coming from industry that are not particularly open or realistic. They're typically very synthetic. And we see OpenPetain and OpenPetain plus Arianne as a mechanism to get real designs that people have actually taped out and can scale to big design points, going through large chip flows, open source chip flows. Okay, so what is really needed here to be a good benchmark or a good use case for open source EDA chip CAD flows? First thing you want is you want a lot of different design variety. And we provide that. So we have big cores, we have small cores, we have caches, we have interconnect, we have actually a GPGPU which is connected into this. We have a different IO and we now have been adding different accelerators into this design mix. So you can basically build complex SOCs out of this design point and we're going to be taping out some of them so that people can use them as reference points. You also want a lot of configurability. So you want to be able to change up different design points because we've heard back from the people that are sort of using this that you want to be able to sort of try different scale and try small scale first and then as you get bigger and bigger and you want to like look at what's going on, you want to try and stress your DRC checking at the scale but you also want to test it in the sort of small case first. So we want to have this different scale and we can build big designs or big real designs that we'll work in and at least in simulation run real programs but no one has a 500 million core design really out there yet because Moore's law has ended and you can't go build chips that big. Okay, so in open pizza, it's not just Virolog. We also give out all of the accoutrements you might need. So we have verification test benches. We have over 8,000 test cases. So if you're building, for instance, a open source verification tool that does the CAD side, you have test cases for that. We also have the power analysis and thermal analysis and we have some PCB designs that for those of you who do build PCB designs, you should please take a look at our boards as input for that. They're pretty complicated designs.  So this is an example of one of the boards here, pretty complex test board that we use to do this sort of careful power analysis. And we've taken this whole piton chip and done careful power analysis and sort of come up with good ground truth. So what is a good ground truth here? So for instance, we measured the energy per hop on your network on chip. So if you're gonna build a best of breed network these days, you can go and actually go look at our paper and it'll tell you sort of how much energy is used for that. And in reality, it's about eight, you can go about eight hops on our knock or network on chip for the energy equivalent of one, let's say ALU. And that's a bunch of the myth of that knocks are really expensive from an energy perspective, it's just not true. Also, we've done a thermo analysis, sort of you can see the nice thermal pictures here, but we've also sort of looked at how much energy it takes to do loads versus stores and different instruction energy usages. And it's really important that this is open source because when we were doing this, we were doing the characterization, well, we designed it so we can go look at it. But if it wasn't open source, it wouldn't be that useful to have these sort of on chip network energy numbers and instruction energy numbers because you wouldn't be able to go look in the design. But because it's all open source, you can go look at it. Okay, so this brings us a little bit back to the EDA tools here. We use a lot of these tools and this is actually a part of a big DARPA program called IDEA where people are building lots of different CAD design tools that are open source and we're the design advisors. So we're giving a lot of this advice and designs out to the users. So we use lots of different open source tools here and we're not just using it but we're actually contributing back. So we've actually filed a bunch of bug reports against all these different open source tools here. And we really need, as just going back to sort of running out of time here, but to sum up that we wanna go back to sort of think about what do we need to have a full open source chip CAD flow, which is a lot. There's a lot of problems you need to go solve there. So actually the right here is the picture of our CAD flow we use sort of commercially and then we're sort of taking all that input and thinking what do we need in the open source world.  And this is all these things that a lot of these open source tools don't currently support. So what is missing and what is sort of coming along here? So I'm gonna make a plug for actually two programs that are not mine, they're not collaborators, but they're people I know well. So the first is UC San Diego led by Andrew Kong has been building this thing called Open Road, which is the closest that we actually have today to a full chip EDA CAD flow. And we're working with them, giving them designs that they're actually gonna tape out and then we're using their tools and we're gonna tape out some chips with full open source chip level EDA CAD tools. Also, the University of Washington as a subcontractor under my program has been building a basically a packaging of those tools to go build a full flow because it's not enough just to have the tools. This is something you learn as you're sort of in the chip business is the tools are just the tools. The glue that holds it together, if the flow and how do you put together the tools and how do you use all the flags is actually more important basically than the tools or just as important as the tools because it takes years to sort of develop. So we're expert chip designers and we're using these tools and sort of building that flow for the open source world. And Mike Taylor's group at the University of Washington has released that down here using the Open Road package together with a 45 nanometer fake library that's free that people can use to go test this out together. What's missing? Okay, so let's say the Open Road design is the most advanced sort of chip level open source CAD tools out there, but there's still a lot of things missing. So first of all, there is no DRC tool for chip level DRC that exists today. The DRC decks are really complex, especially we're taping out stuff in 12 nanometer. It's all FinFET stuff.  So the very complicated DRC decks. So we need a DRC tool. Second, you know, YOSIS is great, but we need YOSIS to be even better. We've found lots of problems with YOSIS in particular. I mean, it's not just like system barrel log support. Let's say we get around that. But, you know, we've seen recently something where their way they do asynchronous clocking just doesn't really make sense. So it's even for, you know, synchronous circuits like the asynchronous reset just just kind of doesn't make sense. And then parasitic tools, better system barrel log support. That's actually coming along with the faster than I was expecting. And then things that people don't really think about is sort of parasitic extraction at the chip level. I think there's a talk about parasitic extraction or 3D field modeling here in this session. But at the chip level, it's actually pretty, it's a slightly different game than the board level. And then power grid and signal integrity issues. So we're building a billion transistor chip with the open source open flow tools. We're taping this out in Global Foundry's 12 nanometer. We're really excited to go do this. And then I want to make a final plug here for we are also here today as part of the decades project, which I also lead now in the DARPA SDH software to find Harvard program, where we're also looking at all these open source designs and the open PTAN design used to go build a heterogeneous many core platform. Okay, so we have a whole community. Think about our time, but you know, you can go to our GitHub page. I wanted to acknowledge all the great students that have gone into this. We like to go do fun things. We went camping at the Grand Canyon this year and the Ariane team and the University of Washington team. And then finally, open road is doing some really great stuff. You should all go check out open road. Okay, that's the amount of time. So I will end there. Taping out these chips for validate your research, I guess. Is that why that you do the actual like silicon tape out? You're saying why? So the question is why are we taping out chips? I guess I'm trying to get a sound. Okay, so I guess I'll repeat the question. You know, why are academics building very large billion transistor chips? And you know, when does this transition to industry? I guess is the question. Yeah, so my research is computer architecture primarily. So we want to test out new computer architecture ideas. You can simulate that, but a lot of times the intuition is wrong from the simulation or you miss a lot of details when you don't actually go implement it. So a lot of people do sort of software level simulation of architectural ideas and it doesn't capture enough of what the real problems are when you actually sort of physically build it. So that's sort of the one answer, the commercialization. Question, I've commercialized things I've built in academia before. So many years ago in graduate school I worked in the MIT raw processor which got commercialized in the Tyler chip. So things can spin out. In academia, that's not our goal.  And we typically use shuttle runs. So shuttle runs or multi-project wafer aggregation is where you have lots of different designs that get aggregated together. So you're wearing an Oshpark shirt. Well, Oshpark kind of does the same thing at the board level. But at the chip level, that's pretty common. But then, yeah, you can go commercial. I mean this stuff's sort of commercial level ideas here, but it's really a test on new architecture ideas. It's a great question here. So, oh, sorry. How, as an academic, how do we interface with the foundries and how do we get the PDKs? And it's not just the PDKs, it's also the intellectual property that you otherwise need. So the PDK is just the design rules you also need like standard cells, RAMs, IOs, PLLs, if you can get one of those. Things like that. So, relationships. So yeah, we license it. Typically a lot of stuff is, you know, free for academic use, but there's also a lot of restrictions on it. And yeah, you need to sort of work through that. It's not easy to get. The horror thing maybe than just gaining access is gaining access to something as advanced as like 12 nanometer. So a lot of the foundries will not give academics access to anything that's sort of near the bleeding edge. And that 12 nanometer, at least for global foundries, is their bleeding edge. So yeah, those relationships, you have to know, you know, people, I'll put a plug in here. I know Metro's sitting in the back of the room. There's maybe some opportunities for other free PDKs coming along. That's a problem. It's their proprietary IP of, you know, what is design rules for a PDK? And I don't know, that's a hard to solve problem to make that open, yeah. So maybe you can do that for like old designs. Old, yeah, things that I've heard floating. Okay, thank you so much.


Hi and welcome back to this video course on biological psychology and in this video video 3.4 We're going to take a look at Gestalt theory Now what is Gestalt theory? Visual information is according to Gestalt theory is processed based on a few simple principles Gestalt principles and this is what is described by Gestalt theory and Gestalt theory I think it is Both historically and theoretically relevant because it is one of the most influential theories in psychology, I would say And it's still to some degree holds. It still describes quite accurately how we some aspects of visual processing It was developed in the early 20th century by a group of psychologists including Max Wertheimer, Kurt Kovka and Wolfgang Köhler Gestalt theory is essentially a set of principles That explain aspects of how we visually perceive the world So I will just walk you through the the basic Gestalt principles You will hear the principles phrased in slightly different ways in different descriptions But here's the description from from the Opus Tex textbook, which I think is okay So here we have an important principle figure ground segmentation So if you look at this video or video this picture I think to me the dominant percept is that I see two faces that are looking at each other, right? So to me the dark the dark areas the black areas are two faces and the noses are facing each other like this to me That's the dominant percept But I can and if I see it like that the faces are to me the foreground and The white areas the background, but I can flip this around. It's by stable stimulus I can also focus on the white on the white area and I can tell myself. Oh, that's actually a vase And if I do that the vase becomes the foreground and then the black area becomes the background and the and these the faces Disappear right so I can choose I can have my perception essentially switch between Seeing the faces and seeing the vase. This is again. I would say Nicely demonstrates the distinction between sensation right because the visual input that I sense is the same But my perception can switch based on whether I choose to see the vase as the foreground or the faces as the four foreground Now and this idea this this idea that we automatically parse the world into a foreground and a background Is the principle of figure ground segmentation and I think it makes a lot of sense, right? Clearly clearly that's what we are doing now if you're looking at my face now For example, obviously you're seeing my face as the foreground and all the little bit of noise that you see in the background You see that as the background, right? It's too trivial to say because you have automatically made this segmentation But in into a factor foreground and a background and actually all all the gestalt principles are so simple Which makes them kind of trivial in a way, but still very interesting Here we have the principle of proximity what the principle of proximity says is that we consider things that are near each other To be part of the same object, right? So if we look at the thing a then I think you would say well that is a grid of six by six is thirty six dots If you look at B if you're a very autistic person You might still insist that that's a grid of six by six is thirty six dots But I think most people would be inclined to first perceive it as three vertical bars, right? and why well simply because These these dots are closer to each other than these dots, right? So we tend to group this together as one bar this together as another bar and this together as another bar Right, which is not to say that we cannot distinguish also the little circles that make up the bars It's just that we have a have a perception of seeing three separate bars here Then we have a quite related principles principle of similarity So if things are similar we tend to group them together So again here we have a grid you could say is a grid of six by six dots But most people would not say that the dominant perception here is that we essentially have six objects, right? We have a line that goes like this line that goes like this The up up and up and up so we tend to group the dots with the same color together because they are similar Right again, we of course we can we can see that this line of dots is made up of individual dots That's not a problem. It's just that we or there was no problem whatsoever It's just that we tend to group these six dots together into into the percept of line because they have the same color That's the principle of similarity Then we have the principle of good continuity So here if we see a stimulus like this Then you are very inclined to see this as a line that goes like this a smooth line and another line That goes like this another smooth line. You might also perhaps see it as a cross, right? But no one would see this as one line that goes like this Another line that goes like this right our perception really resists to that interpretation even though it's in principle a valid interpretation Right, but we strongly vastly prefer to see continuous lines We see prefer to see continuous shapes, and that's the principle of good continuity, right? Whenever we we can make sense of all the visual of all the visual information that we sense in such a way that That that there are continuous lines and smooth shapes, then that's what we do. We prefer good continuity Then we have the principle of closure Now that principle simply holds that if we see a stimulus like these two for example this circle Right the fact that I'm referring to it as a circle and you understand what I mean already illustrates the concept of closure because this is not a circle It is a collection of individual line segments, but the line segments are ins are oriented in such a way It's related to the principle of good continuity I would say that we prefer to see this we kind of fill up it perceptually fill up the missing parts and Perceived prefer to see it as a continuous circle, right? And this for example makes perfect sense imagine that you are looking through through a tree at a building That's behind a tree then the tree would block out little parts of the building, right? It would the leaves of the tree and with the branches of the tree would block out parts of the building But we we still perceive the building as being there as a whole, right? So we kind of through the principle of closure We kind of fill the gaps that the tree the branches and leaves of the tree make in our perception and The same the same principle of course holds for the rectangle here that we see on the right All right, so we whenever our perception can we automatically fill in the gaps or gaps that we have in our perception Okay, now with that let's move on to the to the next video video 3.5 We were going to take a look at the different sense namely hearing


I just finished doing that Super Star Wars video and man those games take a lot out of you, so I'm gonna take it easy for a bit with a simple single screen puzzle game called Busta Move. Many of you might know this one better by its Japanese title, Puzzle Bobble. It stars the two little characters from Bubble Bobble and features a lot of the same themes and art design from those games. Busta Move is one of those games that's gotten a gazillion ports and sequels sprawling all over the place from 3DO, Sega Game Gear, Wonder Swan, Neo Geo, Neo Geo CD, on and on. Maybe the most famous of these games are the arcade sequels, they are crazy as hell and if you like puzzle games I recommend busting out the MAME emulator and playing through a couple of those. But for this video I'm sticking with the Super Nintendo cartridge which is pretty scaled back and simple, but not in a bad way, this is still a perfectly okay port. The way the gameplay works is your character shoots colored bubbles from the bottom of the screen to the top, matching a group of at least two of the same color to eliminate them, the goal being to get rid of all the bubbles before they accumulate past the end line at the bottom. The catch is there's a time limit both to fire off your bubble and to finish the stage, since the ceiling is always moving downward. The controls are very simple, press B to shoot and aim with the D-pad with that helpful arrow there, but it can be really tough to shoot into tight corners like this. What helps though is that you can use the L and R buttons to move the arrow pixel by pixel if you need to. The further you progress through the game's 100 rounds, the more colors you have to deal with the shorter the time limit and the trickier it is to make certain shots. You can use the walls to bounce the bubble off and reach spots you couldn't otherwise, and there's also special bubbles that create certain effects when you reach them, like the flame bubble, shoot a bubble at it and it'll wipe out every other bubble of the same color in the general area. You get 7 continues here, and there is a password system so you can skip to a certain level if you'd like. There's also a versus mode here, not only against a second player, but against the computer. There's a total of 10 different computer opponents you have to beat in a series of three games each. And then let me tell you, you may not believe it, but that computer fellow is actually pretty dang good. Yeah, these levels get absurdly difficult after a certain point. The key component to getting ahead of your opponent in versus mode is creating dropped bubbles, meaning you pop a group of bubbles that are placed further up the screen which results in a few other bubbles falling. This fills a gauge on your opponent's side that sends up even more bubbles making things much more difficult for them. This aspect is what puts the game over the top as a really good two player game and it makes life hell for your opponent, and conversely it's frustrating as hell to deal with. Or maybe you'd rather approach Busta Move as a classic single player arcade game where you just want the highest possible score, and this game can accommodate that as well. The drop to bubble mechanic is just as important there too, since each drop bubble starts at 20 points and doubles for each subsequent bubble. My only real problem with the Busta Move SNES port is you're stuck with the same music looping again and again and again. At least the versus mode has different music to get sick of, but I mean, they couldn't have put at least one other song on here? Jeez. So yeah, Busta Move, or Puzzle Bobble, is a perfectly good single player or two player competitive puzzle game. It's not as crazy or insane as the other more advanced ports, or the arcade sequels which are incredibly addictive, or the more recent 3DS game Busta Move Universe which offers a ton of different game modes. No, the SNES port is very humble, it's simple by design and that's totally fine. It's a good game for what it is.