Alex Towell

The Channel: Animated Series on YouTube

For a while now the writing here has come in series: a set of posts that build one idea from the ground up, in order, until the whole thing stands. That format wants to be watched as much as read. A diagram that assembles itself, a value that moves through a pipeline, a bar chart of amplitudes that shifts when you apply a gate: these are easier to follow when they move. So I built a way to make them move, and the results now live on the metafunctor YouTube channel.

The videos are not a separate project. Each one is built from the same source material as the post it comes from, run through a from-scratch pipeline: Manim for the animation, narrated dialogue for the voice, and the code and math taken straight from the series text. A series landing page here embeds its full playlist, and each individual post embeds its own episode at the bottom, so you can read and watch in the same place without hunting for anything.

There are four playlists so far, thirty-seven videos in total. Here they are.

Algorithms Arise from Algebraic Structure

The Stepanov series, nine episodes: declare the algebraic structure a problem lives in, and the algorithms fall out for free.

Next-Token Prediction: From Solomonoff to Transformers

The sequential-prediction series, eight episodes: what-comes-next as the foundation the whole language-model era stands on, traced from Solomonoff to the transformer.

Quantum Computing from Scratch, in Python

The quantum series, ten episodes: a working simulator built in NumPy from nothing, with a visual language of amplitude bars that makes interference something you can see.