From: Matthew Gingell (gingell@gnat.com)
Date: Tue Jun 12 2001 - 17:43:13 MDT
Francois-Rene Rideau writes:
> NB: the computer's memory is but a humongous lookup table,
> and the CPU is its versatile pattern matching and association program.
> Any digital pattern can be encoded as a program on a digital computer.
To amplify the point, if a machine's set of internal states and
the set of inputs it can distinguish are both finite, pattern
matching is an implementation detail. A memory is an offset and
a cpu is a compressed lookup table.
My home PC, for example, is a couple of years old and it's been
a terrible disappointment. It'll barely let me _write_ 2 ^
billion different lambda expression and it can reduce almost
none of them. Especially frustrating is it's inability to
distinguish expressions it can evaluate from expressions it
can't: A simple warning message would save me an eternity of
waiting for the useless thing to halt. ( Don't buy the
"Universal Turing Machine" hype, it's just marketing. There's
nothing universal about an integer number of answers in a world
with a real number of questions. )
-matt
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:08:06 MST