From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Charles Stevenson)
To: n a <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [RLUG] What's everyone up to?
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 04:27:44 -0800
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On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 05:13:20AM +0000, n a wrote:
> maybe you would find this paper interesing
>
> http://homepage.mac.com/nick_a/p148-wallace.pdf
Combinatorics... something to learn about. Cool :) What does it
do? ;p~
Makes you waste a lot of time thinking... eheh, jk
I've heard "combinatorics" reduced to a soundbyte as "the science of
counting", but it's of course lot more complicated than that... The paper,
though, I think actually has more to do with combinator theory. My plebian
mind (I've never taken a college-level math class, so I guess take this with
a grain of salt) has always summed up the difference between the two thusly:
If you wrote a large program to, say, simulate the behavior of a linux
kernal on certain hardware under in various conditions, cominator theory
could be used to prove whether or not the program was well formed--ie,
whether or not it might throw an error or endless loop or if it would, in
fact, correctly resolve itself to a you're progam's predition (which may or
may turn out to be accurate, that's a different issue). Combinatorics, on
the other hand might be used to predict how many possible outcomes there are
or steps it may take in a minimum or maximum case, and if this is near the
most mathematically optimal...
Like I said, grain of salt... I could be way off...
I saw a presentation on ACL2[1], a "mechinized program verifier" that this
guy used combinator logic to prove the accuracy of one of the Athlon chips
(and finding some mistakes in it's floating point arithmatic) before it
shipped. He also proved part of the Java Bytecode and some code the GCC had
produced, among other things. To this day it's one of the most wicked things
in CS I've ever seen...
Nick
[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/
peace,
core
- --
Charles Stevenson (core) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | GPG:
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