Serious Fun

Peter McOwan was a wonderfully kind friend. We created cs4fn together aiming to show that Computer Science was both serious and fun. Peter was a serious researcher of biologically inspired computing, though he found fun twists to everything he did. He worked on many topics including understanding how we really ‘see’ the world; how, in the future, we will live with robots, and intriguing applications of artificial intelligence. He was also concerned with the ethics of computing. As a serious magician, who loved illusions of all kinds, it was his idea that we teach computing using magic shows. He even helped create a magic trick that would only work in space, performed on the International Space Station. He supported the work of very, many others, getting the best out of undergraduates and researchers alike. Tens of thousands of school students and their teachers have also been inspired by his work. This issue is a mixture of old and new articles about Peter’s work, of those he mentored, and the topics he loved.

- Paul Curzon

Issue 26 of the cs4fn magazine was on Peter's work. You can download the pdf from here.