Re: [stack] Advantages of cat, joy ..?

On Feb 18, 2009, at 11:41 AM, John Cowan wrote:

> Don Groves scripsit:
>
>> An object is sitting on the teacher's desk at the front of the room.
>> The problem is to develop a formal procedure that will move the
>> object from there to the southwest corner of the room. Easy enough...
>>
>> Then the teacher says to repeat the problem with the object sitting
>> on the floor next to the teacher's desk. The only acceptable answer
>> is to pick up the object and place it on the desk -- the rest of the
>> problem is already solved!
>
> A puzzle:  You are in a room with a gas stove, a match, a bucket full
> of water, and a kettle. Your objective is to boil water. What,  
> exactly,
> do you do?  Obviously you light the match, use it to light the stove,
> fill the kettle from the bucket, put it on the stove and wait.
>
> Second puzzle: You are in a room with a gas stove, a lit match, a  
> bucket
> full of water, and a kettle. Your objective is to boil water. What,
> exactly, do you do?  The same thing except not bothering to light
> the match? Wrong. That's physicist/engineer thinking. A mathematician
> would blow out the match and then say he had reduced the problem to  
> the
> previous problem!
>
> IOW, programming is about the Real World, and the Real World is  
> inherently
> stateful.

Point taken. But your example is faulty. Blowing out the match
doesn't reduce to the previous problem as then you no longer
have a match! Try it with a cigarette lighter ;-)
--
don


> -- 
> May the hair on your toes never fall out!       John Cowan
>        --Thorin Oakenshield (to Bilbo)         [email protected]
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