321–330 of 348 posts
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What's IAASL?
Hofstadter's other work, I Am a Strange Loop .
0. The Mind's I
1. Metamagical Themas
2. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
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> seems to miss the fact that Buddhism originated in India and that not only the Japanese word Zen but also Chinese Chán are adaptations of the Sanskrit dhān(a) (meaning originally something like 'concentration' or 'contemplation'). Etymologically this is true, but in the sense of tradition, India doesn't really have a Zen tradition, it really did originate in China. Dhyāna is much more broad and not only part of Bud…
> India doesn't really have a Zen tradition, India certainly has meditative/yogic practices and it seems unlikely to me that some bits of these wouldn't have travelled from India to China along with Buddhism and Sanskritic vocabulary.
A simple example of this is the meaning of "pudding" in British English vs American English.
> Pudding originally referred exclusively to varieties of sweet natural-casing sausage. The meaning grew to encompass anything boiled or steamed in a bag, then shifted to refer primarily to desserts, especially those cooked by boiling or steaming. Most recently, in American English, it has changed to refer exclusively to the thick custardy dessertstuff [1]
So this simple example illustrates that location can have a specific effect on the meaning and connotation of a word, and that a word may have a broad meaning from where it originates, but can have a very specific and different meaning elsewhere.
I could have plenty of other critiques (and share some of OP's), but I had no problem with the record-player metaphor, I found it pretty apt. The very physical/analog nature of a record player makes it not hard for me to imagine a record designed to break a player, one can totally imagine one whose grooves jostle the arm so much it breaks (no idea if this is actually practical, it doesn't really matter). I wonder if…
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perhaps https://www.lighter.world can help... i live with my own temptations in this realm, so i'm not coming from a "i've done it" POV, but from a "this is where i lean when i'm pretty sure i need to give it a real go" one.
The site is sadly broken on Firefox.
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Seriously? You don't know how to write a function that tests if a number is a prime?
of course I do - I misspoke after I missed your reference to prime numbers in the list of open/hard problems. I get why you're including it, but if we're just deciding whether the program halts then "f(x: int) => x is prime ? halt : loop" is clearly resolvable to "doesn't always halt" so I don't see your point.
Yes, that's right. But that was not your original example. Your original example was:
f(x: int) => x is even ? f(x + 1) : halt
But the real point (as I am now repeating for the third time) is that the halting problem is equivalent to proving arbitrary theorems. "f(x: int) => x is prime ? halt : loop" is equivalent to the (very uninteresting) theorem "X is prime" for whatever X you happen to put in. Your original example is equivalent to "there are an infinite number of even numbers", which is slightly more interesting. Replace "even" with "prime" and it gets even more interesting. Replace "prime" with one of the other examples, then it gets more interesting still.
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a dependent typing engine is exactly how I was thinking of representing this - i.e "x: int => x + 1" would have a type signature of "x: int => x + 1". Further compositions would stack. If I e.g. converted the Collatz conjecture to a function I would get the following signatures: - collatz(x: 1) => halt - collatz(x: int where x > 0 && x % 2 = 0) => collatz(x / 2) - collatz(x: int where x > 0 && x % 2 = 1) => collatz(x…
A dependently typed system (or presumably anything else) which allows non-halting definitions is unsound. The classic example is an infinite loop: loop = loop What is the type of `loop`? We can infer it by starting with a completely generic type variable, e.g. `forall t. t`: loop : forall t. t loop = loop Then we can look at the type of the body to see which constraints it must satisfy, and perform unification with t…
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So you'll eat humans with intellectual disabilities?
If a logical statement is true, it does not imply the inverse is true, but the contrapositive. Here is a refresher: https://www.varsitytutors.com/hotmath/hotmath_help/topics/co... Also, who says the intellectually disabled can't be vegans?
I'd owned this book for many years and had a similar experience to OP. But one day someone gave me `I am a Strange Loop`, which I started reading and enjoyed way more. After getting in a little bit Hofstadter makes some apologies for GEB saying it was the sum of work of a very young person. I think he was 24? I think it's pretty incredible considering his age. The things that lead him to thinking critically about con…
> I'd owned this book for many years and had a similar experience to OP. But one day someone gave me `I am a Strange Loop`, which I started reading and enjoyed way more. Thank you for sharing your experience, I may have to give `I am a Strange Loop` a try after all, and do the skip-300-pages trick with GEB. I've tried to get through it multiple times, but I never managed to get far into the later chapters without lit…
Writing style is important for me too. I can complete a narrative, story-style book in 2 days. I can't complete a non-fiction book in that time that's half the size. My favourite books are ones that set out to teach something practical in the form of a story (like The Goal).
I have finished non-fiction books. They tend to be fast paced and immediate with what I want out of them. To the point.
In general, that fits with the ADHD type i.e cut the bullshit and get the point!
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This. 100 times, this. GEB is an alright book, but nobody I know has actually managed to finish it. I Am A Strange Loop discusses the exact same thing, but does so with the experience of years of writing in metaphor, and more importantly, entirely in metaphor . All of the metaphors are well-crafted in that they are both a pleasure to imagine, can be recalled rather easily, and accurately map to what the author is try…
"[...]but nobody I know has actually managed to finish it." I read the book entirely from first to last page, including bibliography, five times in five years. I was at the age of appr. 19-24 and I did not read many other books in that time. Everytime I read it again, it felt like a new book. I keep casually reading random parts of it until today. I like Getty's review, although I do not share it at all. I learned ma…
…well, it would have been, but for some reason I kept struggling to get through it. I thought highly of it, but my secret shame was that my admiration for the book was based mostly on the first two hundred or so pages. It took slogging effort to get myself through the rest, effort sporadically applied over the course of years. I did eventually make my way through the whole thing, but even now, I can’t necessarily be…
Are you supposed to get everything in Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming on the first read? The Art of Computer Programming is a reference work so this isn't as trenchant a counterpoint as you might have thought.