arXiv subjects

Alasdair Lambert

Publications and source records attributed to Alasdair Lambert.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Co-Lecturing With the DED: Explaining Circuit Design via the Draw Encode Display Loop

When representing digital circuits, 2 dimensional hand drawings free us from the linear structure of hardware description languages, enabling intuitive reasoning and making structure explicit. However these drawings are imprecise and inert: they do not enforce that the circuits are well defined and cannot be tested. We want both intuitive visual representations and well defined testable ones but students can struggle to link one to the other. To bridge this gap we present the Draw Encode Display Loop (DED), a Co-Lecturing dynamic which equips students with a systematic method to tackle natural language specifications: 1. Draw: visually informative intermediate representations (truth tables, characteristic tables) to generate a structured circuit diagram. 2. Encode: the diagram by labelling inputs, outputs and intermediate values which can be directly converted to code. 3. Display: the code using an in-house diagrammatic renderer. This is supported by Syrup, an education-focused hardware description language which allows students to define, experiment with and display their own circuits. We support these approaches with survey data gathered from two cohorts of students.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

AutoMCQ -- Automatically Generate Code Comprehension Questions using GenAI

Students often do not fully understand the code they have written. This sometimes does not become evident until later in their education, which can mean it is harder to fix their incorrect knowledge or misunderstandings. In addition, being able to fully understand code is increasingly important in a world where students have access to generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, such as GitHub Copilot. One effective solution is to utilise code comprehension questions, where a marker asks questions about a submission to gauge understanding, this can also have the side effect of helping to detect plagiarism. However, this approach is time consuming and can be difficult and/or expensive to scale. This paper introduces AutoMCQ, which uses GenAI for the automatic generation of multiple-choice code comprehension questions. This is integrated with the CodeRunner automated assessment platform.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

Compositional Game Theory with Mixed Strategies: Probabilistic Open Games Using a Distributive Law

We extend the open games framework for compositional game theory to encompass also mixed strategies, making essential use of the discrete probability distribution monad. We show that the resulting games form a symmetric monoidal category, which can be used to compose probabilistic games in parallel and sequentially. We also consider morphisms between games, and show that intuitive constructions give rise to functors and adjunctions between pure and probabilistic open games.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2017

A Compositional Treatment of Iterated Open Games

Compositional Game Theory is a new, recently introduced model of economic games based upon the computer science idea of compositionality. In it, complex and irregular games can be built up from smaller and simpler games, and the equilibria of these complex games can be defined recursively from the equilibria of their simpler subgames. This paper extends the model by providing a final coalgebra semantics for infinite games. In the course of this, we introduce a new operator on games to model the economic concept of subgame perfection.

cs.GT↗