Bottom-up education

People who discover the power and beauty of high-level, abstract ideas often make the mistake of believing that concrete ideas at lower levels are relatively worthless and might as well be forgotten. The speaker will argue that, on the contrary, the best computer scientists are thoroughly grounded in basic concepts of how computers actually work, and indeed that the essence of computer science is an ability to understand many levels of abstraction simultaneously. Therefore he has put considerable effort into the design of a RISC machine called MMIX, as an aid to computer science educators. MMIX is intended to be simple and clean yet realistic. Many tools have been built to simulate the MMIX architecture, and more are under development.