Teaching programme
Four spine lectures
Not one lecture a week. Four, at the points where the argument turns — each opening a block of three studios and each delivered from a real deck.
This course puts its teaching hours in the studio. Twelve two-hour studios are where the evidence actually gets read, and every one of them has a page on this site carrying the material, not a link to a slide dump.
What the lectures are for is the thing a studio is bad at: saying what the next three weeks are for before you are elbow-deep in a disassembly listing, and saying afterwards what changed. So there are four, one per block, delivered in weeks 1, 4, 7 and 10.
Each carries a deck, and each deck is the deck that was delivered — the numbers on the slides are the numbers in the retained result files, and the slides say where each came from. If a claim on a slide is not on a week page with its evidence beside it, treat the slide as wrong.
Same program, four stories
Why a compiler already makes a program harder to read before anyone tries to, and what it means to say that two very different listings are the same function.
Week 1 · 24 February 2027
Something always simplifies it for you
Three different things reduce obfuscated arithmetic — the algebra, the compiler backend, and your own reading — and confusing them is how people come to believe a simplifier recovered something it never touched.
Week 4 · 17 March 2027
What a proof is worth
A solver can show that a branch has only one reachable outcome. Turning that into a working executable takes a separate tool, and neither step is the same as knowing the program is still correct.
Week 7 · 21 April 2027
The smaller graph problem
Two results in this corpus look like successes and are not. Both were caught by running the program; neither would have been caught by looking at the output. That is the course's conclusion, and this is where it gets argued.
Week 10 · 12 May 2027
Recordings and attendance#
Lectures are recorded and posted with the deck. Attendance is not marked; nothing in the assessment depends on being in the room. The studios are a different matter, because you cannot read someone else’s notes on a disassembly listing and get anything out of it.