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Anansi

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9

[Arsenal of Ninjacr-
acy
]

Level 69 Troll

Resident Psychoanalyst

Duncecap Posted:

As in, mathematicians and physicists and chemists come to me and say: “We have this really cool model, but we don’t know how to explain it to a computer”. Mostly mathematicians. So I come up with ways to represent the systems in procedural language, and program it for them.

The easiest example is simply using symbolic representation like Maxima or Mathematica. But of course, anything they can do by themselves, they do by themselves, so I never get jobs this easy, although it is within the scope of my job.

The harder stuff is coming up with ways to describe certain mathematical systems, and define the operations between them in a way the computer understands. Stuff that’s already beyond Mathematica/Maxima/Etc. ability to represent and compute.

Sounds like a fun career. It must be nice to regularly do that kind of problem-solving.

There’s one job I have hanging now for a couple of months, where the operation between two objects of the same type, cannot be defined in less than a couple hundred lines in english. Wanna bet it’s longer than that in any programming language?

Log in to see images! At least you have a worthy project.

Anyhoo, no, never heard of Hofstadter.

Well, probably not worth bothering to look up. He wrote quite a bit in the aforementioned book about Godel’s incompleteness theorem, which is why I thought of it.

And I would ask what differentiates a thought from other computation? I can think of no computation which is not also a thought.

Which is not also a thought, or which cannot be thought?

I will add more later—time to get some rest.

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