Re: Productivity With Lisp (was Re: I get it)

From: Karl A. Krueger (kkrueger_at_example.edu)
Date: 03/18/05 

Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 21:52:51 +0000 (UTC)

Kent M Pitman <pitman@nhplace.com> wrote:
> "Karl A. Krueger" <kkrueger@example.edu> writes:
>> jayessay <nospam@foo.com> wrote:
>> > No, but for all we know, we may well all have had _uncomputable_
>> > thoughts.
>>
>> How would you tell if you had?
>
> If I were to take your question seriously, I think the answer is:
> You'd laugh.
>
> I believe at least one broad classification of humor can be traced to
> situations the brain has marked as 'computationally questionable'.
> Consider the notion of handing someone a card that says "see other
> side" on both sides. These become "patterns" of humor where people
> learn to recognize and laugh rather than continue computing. Probably
> the right brain is watching for the "going in circles" phenomenon all
> the time to make sure the left brain doesn't melt down.

A function whose computation takes just one more recursive call than
your stack can handle is not an incomputable one -- it's just one that
you can't compute right now. So catching a stack overflow doesn't mean
you tried to compute something incomputable -- it just means you tried
to compute something too deep ... or used the wrong approach.

The problem of detecting the condition "I'm spending too many cycles on
this problem" seems similar to the economics problem of information in a
market. Markets for goods and services are supposed to work the best
when all participants have access to all information -- however, the act
of gathering information does itself consume time and resources which
could otherwise be spent on goods.

(In other words, eventually you have to stop "shopping around" and buy
something, take the job, whatever ... even though it's possible that if
you just looked in one more place you could find a better deal.)

None of this suggests anything *incomputable* is going on, just that
these systems (stacks, brains, language users or instruction followers,
buyers and sellers) have resource limits and have to do their work in
real time that really does count.

I think something else is going on in reading the "see other side" card.
We recognize humor here because of the clash between two kinds of
interpretation: that of the "mindless" follower of instructions, and
that of the intentionality-bearing writer of those instructions.
"Mindlessly" following instructions is only sensible when one presumes
that the writer of instructions has some useful meaning in mind. When
the writer is just being perverse, there is no sense in following the
instructions.

The more esoteric of "lightbulb jokes" may fall into the same category,
e.g.: "How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? Two --
one to play the accordion while the other fills the bathtub with
brightly colored machine tools." The fact that the proposed algorithm
totally fails to accomplish the stated goal is part of the joke.

ObLisp: The one about the "conforming Common Lisp implementation" that
does nothing but signal an out-of-memory error and exit, is much the
same. The program is strictly "following the rules" for being a Lisp
implementation, even though it can never accomplish the presumed goal of
all implementations, namely to correctly run conforming Lisp programs.
It is funny because pointless.

> I further believe that a lot of the reason people concern themselves
> with good style, whether in natural language or programming language,
> is to limit the computational complexity for the language receiver so
> that it doesn't exceed normal computational bounds.

Sure. Users of bad grammar and spelling sometimes claim that if the
reader can tell what they mean, their usage should be accepted. The
problem is that bad and ambiguous grammar place extra "system load" on
the reader. Like fraud in a marketplace, the meaning behind the bad
grammar can eventually be found out -- but it costs extra effort. 

-- 
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger@example.edu> { s/example/whoi/ }

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