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/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] 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 <li...@hpcoders.com.au <mailto:li...@hpcoders.com.au> > wrote: On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 08:49:44PM -0400, lrudo...@meganet.net <mailto:lrudo...@meganet.net> 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 hpco...@hpcoders.com.au <mailto:hpco...@hpcoders.com.au> 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
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