Comments on: Teaching an imbecile to play bridge

By: twretjweir

twretjweir — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 02:48:56 +0000

That reminds me of this, unattributed quote:

Functional programming is like describing your problem to a mathematician.
Imperative programming is like giving instructions to an idiot.

By: Tomas Olsson

Tomas Olsson — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 09:53:46 +0000

As researcher in machine learning and AI, I can just say that it is so true.

By: Tomas Olsson

Tomas Olsson — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 09:53:20 +0000

As researcher in machine learning and AI. it is so true

By: Rob W

Rob W — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:19:27 +0000

Computers provide reliability?

If you’ve ever shipped software to be run by users… well, some days the imbecile would be a better bet for reliability.

Computers rely on lots and lots of little things — physical stuff like the hard drive, memory, wifi card etc. but also the entire topography that is the OS and installed software in all its variations, and the functioning of all of those interacting parts produces incredible and ever-changing diversity.

What will your software do if the wifi flakes out? If the drive it’s writing to fills up? In case of a power failure? If basic services are misconfigured/broken/obsolete/virus-ridden/etc.?

Writing server-only software is better, but still not perfect.

By: Nick Brown

Nick Brown — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 23:38:28 +0000

Reminded me of the following passage from Douglas Adams’ novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency: “What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?”

I suppose we’ll never now know where Adams got the inspiration for this passage, but I don’t think he had objections to pilfering other peoples good ideas.

By: Laurens

Laurens — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 23:32:10 +0000

@Jorge; I believe you are incorrect. There are certain types of computer algorithms (nondeterministic ones, to be precise) that don't always return the same output on consisten input. Wikipedia has more information.

By: Jorge

Jorge — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 20:16:04 +0000

Actually computers are better because you tell them to do something and they do it EXACTLY the same over and over providing reliability. People… they deviate.

By: mcdan

mcdan — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 20:03:24 +0000

The only thing your computer knows with any certainty is that +3(or 5)V is a on and anything else is off.

By: fred ancheta

fred ancheta — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 18:48:53 +0000

how dare you call my computer an imbecile!

By: Ruben Berenguel

Ruben Berenguel — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:02:36 +0000

I’ll never look at my computing devices the same. Never.

Ruben