Post #563360

2026-03-07 02:30 UTC

@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca I believe expressiveness is a cognition issue, i.e., having to do with how the human brian works and how we learn. If you train yourself to recognize certain kinds of patterns, then certain kinds of problems become easier to solve. ... and right there I've just summarized every mathematics, science, and programming curriiculum on the planet. What's "easy" depends the patterns you've learned. The more patterns you know, the more problems you can solve. Every set of patterns that you can re-express as sub-patterns of one big super-pattern that's small enough to keep in your head is a win. I'm not actually sure there's anything more to "intelligence" than this. 3/n

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@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net 2026-03-07 02:32

@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca I still remember trying to teach my dad about recursion. He was a research chemist. At some point he needed to do some hairy statistical computations that were a bit too much for the programmable calculators he had in his lab. Warner-Lambert research had just gotten some IBM mainframe -- this was early 1970s, and so he decided to learn FORTRAN -- and he became one of their local power-users. Roughly in the same time-frame, 11-year-old me found a DEC-10 manual one of my brothers had brought home from college. It did languages. Part 1 was FORTRAN. Part 2 was Basic. But it was last section of the book that was the acid trip. Part 3 was about Algol. 4/n

Open ##563384