Rabin-Scott Finite Automata and Their Decision Problems
Process algebra and automata theory
Milner’s Communication and Concurrency contrasts a notion of “bisimulation” with what he characterizes as the view in standard automata theory. Standard automata theory, however, has a much more interesting and well defined notion of both equivalence and concurrency than what
Comrades Cheyne and Stokes and mathematics
There is a great book of stories by Soviet era radio astronomer Iosef Shklovsky called 5 Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon which has a this story (which I tell from memory, no guarantees) In 1953 a young Jewish math
Judea Pearl’s mysterious claim
Pearl: Of course, but you cannot see this noble aspiration in scientific equations. The language of algebra is symmetric: If x tells us about y, then y tells us about x. I’m talking about deterministic relationships. There’s no way to write in mathematics a simple fact—for example,
victor.yodaiken@gmail.com
See also: Damore’s Defenders. Scott Aaronson is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Texas. I ran into his blog a while back, when someone sent me to his muddled defense of Damore and the Google Memo
Xor patterns
The xor i mod 128 “multiplication table” as presented by Mathematica. Here is the mod 64 matrix.
informal methods applied to networks and timeouts
Distributed computation involves many interesting issues concerning shared data. Here I want to sketch out what networks look like using applied (informal) mathematics so we can look at some algorithms for consensus and data consistency. No formal methods or category
James Damore’s defenders (updated)
(recently saw a post claiming that Damore’s firing was an indication of closed minds at Google, so it seemed important to repost this – vy) The Google manifesto is a crackpot political argument combined with basic scientific ignorance, not a scientific
Current reading: July 8 2017
Principal type-schemes for functional programs∗ Luis Damas† and Robin Milner First published in POPL ’82: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, ACM, pp. 207–212 THE PRINCIPAL TYPE-SCHEME OF AN OBJECT IN COMBINATORY LOGIC BY
Basic math for basic algorithms
It’s odd that all the descriptions of basic programming operations, such as sorting, rely on pseudo code or complex formal logic. All we are doing is modifying finite sequences so it seems like we should be able to use ordinary