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

John Cowan wrote:
> 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!

That's engineer thinking.

The physicist would blow out the match slowly, and say that if we assume
reversible processes, we've reduced the problem to the previous case.

Also: make sure the problem statement doesn't incorporate the presence
of thermite, or the engineer's solution to every problem becomes the
same. (And he will never have the same problem twice!)

> IOW, programming is about the Real World, and the Real World is
> inherently stateful.

Stateful and irreversible.

But this doesn't tell us a lot about computation, only about the real
world. Any model of computation will always eventually fail. Modeling it
on physics fails quickly.

-Wm