Exciting Unlimited Register Machines

A brief and entertaining talk by an obviously excited presenter. 🙂 It goes into the same directions as Jim Weirich’s talk about the Y combinator.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q-UwjgZ0q4

Programming is Meaningless

Researchers seemingly have found a way to tell-apart students which will do well in computer science classes and those who won’t. More eloquently put they’ve devised a way  “[to] separate programming sheep from non-programming goats.” 😀

And they come to an interesting conclusion:

Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it.
Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat, 2006, “The camel has two humps (working title)”

I have accepted it. -.-