Question: How could your work benefit us, by making programming easier does it allow new things to be programmed, or simply save time?

Sarah Mount answered on 15 Mar 2010:

Well, more by making programming easier and particularly to make it easy to program complicated systems where lots of computers have to work together at once.

The largest number of small computers which can “sense” their environment and work together to share their data, is around 1000. That still isn’t a very large number for a “wireless sensor network” and trying to make even 1000 computers work together well is still very hard. The only large system like that that works is the Internet, but that works because all the computers are plugged into the mains electricity supply and lots of technicians are employed to fix them when they go wrong. Imagine if your home was full of tiny computers, playing your favourite music to you as you walk around the house, controlling the temperature and light in the house and so on. You wouldn’t want to have to replace lots of batteries or fix those machines all the time, you’d want them to fix themselves and power themselves. No one quite knows how to make these very big systems work in a simple way yet.