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/
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] 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 <[hidden email]> wrote:
On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 08:49:44PM -0400, [hidden email] 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 [hidden email]
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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