OK, I'll bite. Why NOT let entropy simply be an equation that is useful in certain domains?
I rather like the lack of ambiguity. -- Owen On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Russell Standish <[email protected]>wrote: > On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 08:49:44PM -0400, [email protected] wrote: > > > > Most recently, I've been going through the same exercise > > (again for a chapter, now not in a book of my own) for > > "recursion" and "recursive". Again, I have accumulated > > ... what a mess! > > Back in the day when I was teaching computational science for a > living, I had to carefully explain the difference between two distinct > meanings of recursion. > > 1) A "recursive loop" is one whose iterations depend on values computed > in the previous loop. Related obviously to the "oldest" mathematical > definition you gave. It impedes vectorisation and parallelisation of > said loop. > > 2) A "recursive function" is one that calls itself, a term quite > familiar to people brought up in computer science. > > In the good old days, when men programmed in Fortran, concept 1 was > always meant, as Fortran did not support recursion. That has all > changed now :). > > And there is a third meaning for recursion used by theoretical > computer scientists, where is basically means a computable > function. See page 29 of Li and Vitanyi's tome of Kolmogorov complexity. > > Cheers > > - > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) > Principal, High Performance Coders > Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] > University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
