Multi-Limericks

by Richard Peacock

Greetings Multiverse lovers (i.e., people who accidentally noticed this post)! Who doesn't love a dirty, filthy, bathroom-stall quality limerick? Okay, now how many of those people also love nerdy, vague, and hard-to-rhyme computer science themed limericks? If you fall into this narrow subset, then read on!

My first limerick is about Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science. Among is many contributions, he devised the "Turing Test," which tests whether or not a computer A.I. can fool a person into thinking he is chatting with a human being through a remote terminal.

"Alan Turing"

A mathematician named Turing professed:
"We should put computer AI to the test!
We'll have it converse
In diction (quite terse),
And ask, 'Was computer or human the best?'"

My second limerick remembers everyone's favorite ancient computer, the ENIAC (pronounced In-EE-Ack). It filled several rooms, used thousands of vacuum tubes, and took over 150,000 watts of electricity to run.

"ENIAC"

There once was a computer named ENIAC,
With stats that would give you a heart attack.
It took up 600 square feet,
But was Turing-Complete,
And programming required a brainiac.

Finally, a limerick about our little friend, the transistor. It's a super-cheap, super-fast, and super-small electronic component that replaced vacuum tubes in the 1950's. Your average modern computer has about 230 million of the little buggers on the CPU alone.

"The Transistor"

Vacuum tubes were all well and good,
But didn't switch as fast as they should,
So Bell Labs designed the transistor
(Vacuum tube's solid-state sister)
And made them as cheap as they could.

The Multiverse is written by Richard Peacock, who generally doesn't know what he's talking about, and will gladly sacrifice scientific accuracy for the sake of a rhyme. Send rhyming complaints to richard@amateurscientist.org