At best this is closed-minded. At worst it's ignorant. There are lots of cases where adding some formalism to intuitive notions has produced wonderful new insights.
Take for example the denotational semantics of recursive definitions (or loops if you prefer). These were "obvious" just as you imply the term "algorithm" is. Yet until some visionaries formalized the domains of computation as CPOs and lattices and then described recursive defs in terms of least fixed points of function spaces, we were missing out on an entire family of ways to reason about what programs actually compute. To pull one concrete benefit of this treatment out of the air, Robin Milner was able to use these results to prove that the ML type inference algorithm is sound and complete (a very rigorous form off "correct"), connecting types to computation in an entirely new way. For this and other related work he won the Turing Award! All who claim to be computer scientists ought to read his classic paper. It's a work of art. So if some people are willing to search for formal ways of looking at old ideas in the hope of advancing knowledge the way Milner did, the least we can do is cheer them on. I don't think that's asking too much, do you? Thanks for your work, Noson. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Algorithm Geeks" group. To post to this group, send email to algogeeks@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/algogeeks -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
