(especially wrt the latter, I've suspected that EWD had been attempting to redo with OR/EQL the dual of what EE's had long been doing —whether in knowledge or in ignorance of Zhegalkin— with AND/XOR)
We then moved onto OCaml, where we built an interpreter for a toy implementation of C. The ability to use recursion to define your problems was invaluable, especially as parsing and lexing is inherently a recursive affair.
At last, we arrived at Prolog. I had never heard of this language before, but it was intriguing. It took the declarative approach of some other languages and put it into overdrive. You're telling me I don't have to do any work, that I can just set up my constraints and the language itself would automatically figure out the solution? It was like magic to me. I've always liked Prolog and declarative languages from then on, and it taught me that computers are indeed powerful, if we merely allow them to solve problems on our behalf.
I thank your friend Maarten on the work he did on Prolog and on the influence he surely had on me through that work. May he rest in peace.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> computer science [ed: in a theory dept!] is mathematics, but much of it is the mathematics that mathematicians are not interested in.
Not to multiply van Emden's examples to excess, but constructive logics (without excluded middle) are also in the category of "classy if your dept. is CS; trashy if your dept. is MA". How about Foundational Type Theories?
And thank you for the link. I lazily clicked on the first (his last article’s) link* and hours later my mind is still engaged with his words. He zeroed in on a matter (kinds of intelligence) that’s been a recent preoccupation of mine; his hypothesis of partial ordering of intelligence hits the precisely correct distinguishing note in my opinion.
Since you were friends, would be interested to know his thoughts on the full scope of Polanyi’s tacit knowledge (that he mentioned in his remarks on “AI”) which included metaphysical aspects.
~
* (this really should be a top level post.)
“AI” : what’s in a name? | Maarten van Emden | 2019
https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/ai-whats-in-a-name...