![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Alonzo Church, we salute you!
Sep. 4th, 2003 01:24 amSo today, I woke up feeling kinda lazy. But I got over it... but I haven't run yet, so I'm doing that next. Because I'm all caffeined up now.
Before class, I headed out to the stucen, checked my mail and found out that a bunch of relatives had sent birthday cards (yay! :) Thank you, family!), picked up tickets for this weekend's outing to Six Flags, and ate a burrito...
... and then in my One Class for the day, we got our iPaqs, on which we'll be hacking up the kernel :)
Nobody came to see me during my office hours, but that was alright, because I got a lot of grading done.
Perhaps most interestingly today... after Stevie (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sstrickl) and myself taught the day's recitation, we got to talking about just what it was he did, research-wise... and it turns out that he's doing research with Olin Shivers that involves ... umm... algorithms that have to do with building trees that have to do with lambda calculus. To work up to all of this, he took to the chalkboard and explained to me the deal with lambda calculus (Lisp is based on this idea)... and eventually worked up to the Church-Turing thesis, which pretty much says that Lambda Calculus Is A Turing Machine, which means that you can compute a whole lot of things with it -- like all of the things you can compute with a more fleshed-out programming language, like BF or C or something. This is absolutely insane, considering that there are like three operations in lambda calculus, and they all have to do with these anonymous functions (like lambda-bodies in Lisp, for my lisp-ite readers out there, all 0 of you) that go through ... I think three different transformations that you can do, all named with greek letters... uh...
... but anyway, he demonstrated how you could recursively define numbers, or a factorial function, or a NAND gate, all out of lambda calculus. And if you can make a NAND gate, you can built pretty much anything. You could build a whole computer out of NANDs.
... so yeah, essentially, Stevie's frighteningly clever (and a really great guy -- it's an honour to get to teach with him), and I'm reminded of how much wizardry there is out there that I don't know yet, not even a little bit. I am but an egg.
... and there's only one more day in my school week :) And Cimmy's coming over on Friday afternoon. Yay!
Time for a late-night constitutional.
Before class, I headed out to the stucen, checked my mail and found out that a bunch of relatives had sent birthday cards (yay! :) Thank you, family!), picked up tickets for this weekend's outing to Six Flags, and ate a burrito...
... and then in my One Class for the day, we got our iPaqs, on which we'll be hacking up the kernel :)
Nobody came to see me during my office hours, but that was alright, because I got a lot of grading done.
Perhaps most interestingly today... after Stevie (
sstrickl) and myself taught the day's recitation, we got to talking about just what it was he did, research-wise... and it turns out that he's doing research with Olin Shivers that involves ... umm... algorithms that have to do with building trees that have to do with lambda calculus. To work up to all of this, he took to the chalkboard and explained to me the deal with lambda calculus (Lisp is based on this idea)... and eventually worked up to the Church-Turing thesis, which pretty much says that Lambda Calculus Is A Turing Machine, which means that you can compute a whole lot of things with it -- like all of the things you can compute with a more fleshed-out programming language, like BF or C or something. This is absolutely insane, considering that there are like three operations in lambda calculus, and they all have to do with these anonymous functions (like lambda-bodies in Lisp, for my lisp-ite readers out there, all 0 of you) that go through ... I think three different transformations that you can do, all named with greek letters... uh...... but anyway, he demonstrated how you could recursively define numbers, or a factorial function, or a NAND gate, all out of lambda calculus. And if you can make a NAND gate, you can built pretty much anything. You could build a whole computer out of NANDs.
... so yeah, essentially, Stevie's frighteningly clever (and a really great guy -- it's an honour to get to teach with him), and I'm reminded of how much wizardry there is out there that I don't know yet, not even a little bit. I am but an egg.
... and there's only one more day in my school week :) And Cimmy's coming over on Friday afternoon. Yay!
Time for a late-night constitutional.
