Talking about maths
Aug. 25th, 2006 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackLast night at the Carlton contained more maths than I've heard for a while, talking with Simon and Tony and Deborah about generalisations of Simon's infinity machine, which can run an infinite number of instructions in second. I'd been thinking about this all week, but ended up mostly agreeing with Simon's original comments.
It's strange to be someone who knows something about it, when normally I'm talking about technology someone else knows more about, or maths with people who know more, or with people who aren't interested in either :)
Choice quotes:
The clever solution to the infinite-number-of-people-buried-in-the-sand-puzzle is all very well, but what if one of them is a bridget jones? "Today. Oh dear, got squiffy and killed an infinite number of people because I couldn't count to two. Oopsie. Alchohol units: 2. Deaths: Aleph-0. V. v. bad."
The machine is uncountable, not psychic.
OK, suppose it does one operation for each moment of (real valued) time.
Oh my god, that's awful. You know what we've invented? We've invented BASIC!
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO PI
ETA: We may have made a mockery of "Beginners" Instruction Langauge but we've got "All Purpose" down pat!
Of course, you could use an infinite number of copies of yourself as a spam filter.
My head hurts. Lets not talk about maths any more.
It's strange to be someone who knows something about it, when normally I'm talking about technology someone else knows more about, or maths with people who know more, or with people who aren't interested in either :)
Choice quotes:
The clever solution to the infinite-number-of-people-buried-in-the-sand-puzzle is all very well, but what if one of them is a bridget jones? "Today. Oh dear, got squiffy and killed an infinite number of people because I couldn't count to two. Oopsie. Alchohol units: 2. Deaths: Aleph-0. V. v. bad."
The machine is uncountable, not psychic.
OK, suppose it does one operation for each moment of (real valued) time.
Oh my god, that's awful. You know what we've invented? We've invented BASIC!
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO PI
ETA: We may have made a mockery of "Beginners" Instruction Langauge but we've got "All Purpose" down pat!
Of course, you could use an infinite number of copies of yourself as a spam filter.
My head hurts. Lets not talk about maths any more.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-25 03:29 pm (UTC)[Doh! Edited. Thank you.]