Tom Murphy VII welcomes you to the internet.

CS PhD alumnus (2001–2007)
Advisors: Bob Harper, Karl Crary
Phone: Who uses phones??

Hi I finished grad school! A long time ago! Now I'm just a guy with a PhD, some papers, and a bunch of projects.

I love programming languages to the max. For my research I worked on the ConCert Project, eventually designing and implementing a typed programming language for distributed programming called ML5. It's based on modal logic and I formalized lots of the proofs in Twelf so they can be verified by our patient and careful friends, computers. Lots of people don't care about programming languages, possibly because they think that all languages are the same, or they don't want help from their patient and careful friends, or have never used an optimizing compiler for a high-level language, or they suspect that programming is mostly about taping together programs that other people wrote. I am fairly certain that I have more fun programming than these people, which makes me sad.

I love to make things. For many years, I used to crank out loads of TrueType fonts. I bet you have seen them on posters or T-shirts and not even known it. I also spent a long time writing and recording music in profusion for my album-a-day project or other bands. Like for example I like to make intricate Nintendo-esque songs with primitive waveforms, or bedroom acoustic guitar with my homebrew plugins.

One of the best things about grad school was that if you get your work done then you get to do other stuff too. Like for example in 2003 I wrote a novel called Name of Author by Title of Book in a month. The next year I wrote His Sophomoric Effort which I would even not be embarrassed if you read.

Some know me for my software that learns to play Nintendo games and my video series showing its adventures. I made them and many other weird things for the prestigious conference SIGBOVIK. I also figured out how to automatically make NES games 3D and do seemingly impossible tricks by reverse-emulating NES hardware.

Other hacks with videos include a portmanteau of every word in English, a C compiler that produces executable text files, unlikely bikes, dismemberment of letters to make generalized anagrams, 30 weird chess algorithms, making letters even more lowercase, and hard drives we didn't want or need.

Exploring the dizzying depths of uselessness, I once Alphabetized Star Wars. Disturbingly, it might be my most famous accomplishment.

A former habit I enjoyed and should rekindle was making games in 48h periods for an event called Ludum Dare. You can play these in your browser. Of the games that still work, I recommend Dragon Drop (theme "Minimalism"—there's more to it if you think to dismiss it); Single Dragon (theme "You only get one"); and Entire Screen of One Game (theme "Entire Game on One Screen"). The last of those unexpectedly exploded hundreds of thousands of brains (and ended up in the Centre Pompidou!). The browser-accessible Connector World (theme "Connected Worlds"); and Running out of Space (eponymous theme) may entertain you as well. Alas, several good games are now hard to access due to the demise of Flash, but you could try: T in Y World (theme "Tiny World"); Is Lands? (theme "Islands"); Disco? Very! (theme "Discovery"); Priority Cats (theme "It's dangerous to go alone. Take this!"); One of the best birthdays (theme "Evolution"); Escape Cod (theme "Escape"); Point One Hurts (theme "10 Seconds"); Age of Umpires (theme "You are the villain").

Escape is a cross-platform puzzle game I have been working on for over 20 years (!). It's like a push-the-blocks game with other gadgets and a built-in editor and online features and a lot of really creative puzzles that people have submitted.

Spare cycles during class were directed into my notes, which are a stream-of-consciousness circus of typography and cartooning. They're collected in Illustrated Notes from Computer Science for your amusement. For a while I would upload my photographs but now I just keep them on my computer and never show them to anyone.

Another weird thing is that over the course of 16 years I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh.

snoot.org is a highly interactive web page I started ten years ago, and occasionally work on.

Here are some high-speed movies, some old MIDI thing, a program for making Nintendo music out of MIDI files, icon emporium, a game we made for OLPC called Headcat, my logo for the CMU CSD, how to fix MP3 players if you're me or impatient like me, hi-res pictures of me, some kind of high-performance computational genomics tool, and all the talks I ever gave, if you somehow can still run Flash movies.

Back when I was an undergraduate at CMU, I made a different web page that has lots of other stuff on it and is kind of embarrassing.

And finally, though this page is rather static, I have a weblog called Tom 7 Radar which I keep up-to-date with my adventures and projects. You can also find me on Twitter as @tom7.

snoot.org tom 7 radar fonts.tom7.com album-a-day old CMU webpage