Do you really feel that turds are equivalent to probability measures? I can see that a mouse emits more turds when excited, that's fine. It doesn't lead to measures of security on the internet. It doesn't quantify information.
And thermodynamics and information theory have made good use of the probabilistic reduction of entropy. And it is concrete and well defined. So what's wrong with that? -- Owen On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Nick Thompson <[email protected]>wrote: > OK, I’ll bite your bite. For the same reason that the world was outraged > when some experimental psychologists defined emotionality as the number of > turds left in an open field maze by a white rat. **** > > ** ** > > N**** > > ** ** > > Nicholas S. Thompson**** > > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology**** > > Clark University**** > > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/**** > > ** ** > > *From:* Friam [mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Owen > Densmore > *Sent:* Friday, October 11, 2013 8:28 PM > *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Notions of entropy**** > > ** ** > > 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 >
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