October 2007
3 posts
Quantity Implies Quality
Quantity implies quality.
Example: In recent news, a professor searched 2,985,984 possible candidates for a universal Turing machine. In an earlier era when computing power was scarce, that may have been too many to search in a practical amount of time. But this guy found the answer. (Well, maybe.)
Example: Chess-playing is currently a prediction problem, but if resources increase enough to...
Everything Is a Compiler
All algorithms can be classified into one of the following.
Search Engines
Prediction Engines
Networks
Operating Systems
Compilers
This becomes obvious when you look at what programs do from a high level: search, predict, communicate, manage resources, and translate/transform.1 Search
Searching is when you start with a question and your goal is to determine the answer. The answer...
Perl Is Female
I’m learning Perl now. I’ve used it before but never got deep into it.
From a logic-foundations perspective of programming languages, Perl makes absolutely no sense. Its semantics have no rhyme or reason. It is completely illogical.
I searched for a Perl language spec and found this on wikipedia.
There is no written specification or standard for the Perl language, and no plans to...