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June 14, 2004
A concept which is pretty
familiar to most computer
geeks is "recursion".
Sometimes you have a subroutine
which calls itself, i.e. which
is defined in terms of itself.
That seems tremendously paradoxical
when you first encounter the idea,
but a few examples make it clear how
it works.
The trick is that the subroutine
can not *always* call itself
(which would result in an
infinite loop), instead there's
a conditional in there; the In practice this
algorithm checks something to "infinite loop"
see if it should call itself again. would be a stack
blow-up.
See the book Every call pushes
When philosophers run "Goedel, Escher, information on
into similar tangles, Bach" by Hofstader the stack.
they tend to throw up for endless
their hands and say tedious examples Eventually you'd
"circular reasoning"! of recursion in run out of room
different contexts. to store it.
CIRCLES
It's at least Recursion isn't
possible that In may be that used very often
that's a he says something because it tends
premature much like I'm to run into the
reaction. saying here. memory limits
of the computer
Having something I fell asleep (and the mental
defined in terms half-way through limits of the
of itself is not that book, so programmer).
by itself a sign I wouldn't know.
of nonsense.
A typical
However: the odds programmer's Some languages
seem good that first example (or more to
some sort of ethical is computation the point, the
philosophy with of factorials, cultures of
a loop structure that is, people who use
to it would not be the languages)
very satisfying. 5! = 5*4*3*2*1 are more suited
to recursion
I would fear that the which can be than others.
loops would be thought of as
treated as a mystical The children
knot which could be 5! = 5*4! of lisp.
used to generate
rationalizations for The factorial for
any course of action. N is defined in
terms of factorial
for (N-1).
You know you're done
when N-1 is 0;
0!=1 by definition.
If that doesn't
Still, there's a strong trend of make sense, try
thought that hierarchies are reading:
traps: searching for the right
privileged node to put at the top RECURSIVE_DEFINITION
is a losing game.
Distributed decision-making.
Anarchic networks.
Evolved structures. CONTROL
A way out of the Wasteland?
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