GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech How to Discover the Binary System as a Child • Simon Peyton Jones & Chelsea Troy
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Nov 28, 2025 Join Simon Peyton Jones, a Royal Society member and Haskell contributor, alongside Chelsea Troy, an MLOps Tech Lead at Mozilla. They delve into the spark that led Simon to invent the binary system during a school exercise, highlighting the importance of teaching problem-solving over simply providing answers. The duo discusses the role of concrete contexts in learning, from using Scratch to hands-on projects, and Simon shares insights from his work on the Verse programming language at Epic Games, emphasizing elegance in functional programming.
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Discovering Binary Through Envelopes
- Simon Peyton Jones recounts a school exercise where a bank clerk must make any sum 0–1000 using only 10 envelopes.
- Working up from 1,2,4,8... led him to invent the binary system and an enduring aha moment.
Use Constraints To Guide Problem Solving
- Give students constrained, concrete instances (e.g., only 10 envelopes) to nudge them toward elegant solutions.
- Solve small examples, spot the pattern, then generalize using induction-like reasoning.
Teach Process Over Final Answers
- LLMs let students jump to answers, so education must shift from answer-getting to teaching robust problem-solving processes.
- Emphasize iterative decomposition and transferable strategies rather than memorizing algorithms.