What this is

How It Ticks is a small museum of how things work. Each exhibit is a working model you can handle: a lock you slide a key into and then pick with your finger, the random number a chatbot keeps choosing, the tokens a sentence is cut into. You change something and see right away what happens, and the text next to it explains why the real thing behaves the same way.

I choose topics where moving a part teaches more than a page of text, from the lock on your door to the language model in your phone. The exhibits stand in halls, like in a real museum, and the plan of the museum shows what is on display now.

How close is the model to the real thing?

Close in how it works, small in size. A lock gets five pins; a chatbot gets ten candidate words instead of 200,000, because nobody can read a chart with 200,000 bars. Every exhibit ends with a short section that lists what the toy leaves out.

Numbers come from primary sources, such as patents, research papers and the maker’s own documentation, or from runs I did myself and wrote down with their conditions. Each exhibit lists its sources at the bottom.

Is anything collected?

No. Nothing you type or drag leaves your browser. There are no accounts, no cookies and no ads; Cloudflare, which serves the site, counts page views only as totals. Like any website, the host (Cloudflare) sees your IP address in order to send you the page; the privacy page has the details.

Can I use this in class?

Yes, for free and without asking. Project any exhibit on the classroom screen, link to it from a lesson, a worksheet or a school site, and let students try the models on their own phones. That holds for any non-commercial teaching. Please don’t copy the pages or the code onto another site; link to them, so the sources and corrections stay in one place.

How often is there something new?

Roughly every week or two. Most of the time goes into the model: it has to feel right under a finger, on a phone first, before the exhibit opens.