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

On Feb 18, 2009, at 3:36 PM, William Tanksley wrote:

> 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.

The weird yet wonderful world of computation. What is it that drives
us to beat our heads against this particular wall?
--
don



> -Wm