12 Comments

Forty-Two

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Haha I knew someone would do it :)

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You have to!

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I see that Michael beat me to the inevitable "42" joke, so I won't do it. (And yet, I kind of will do it in a roundabout way by starting my comment with this paragraph.)

Great stuff. I enjoyed a lot of the fascinating backstory details about Turing that I wasn't familiar with.

Although I'll probably need another pass (or ten) to properly catch up on some of the other concepts, many of which are new to me.

The question is: Will I halt once I reach a sufficient level of understanding or will I continue iterating on my knowledge indefinitely?

Stay tuned to (maybe never) find out!

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Incredible, absolutely incredible. My interest in computer science began way back when I was in high school and my friend gifted me a book called The Code Book by Simon Singh. Originally, it was my love for Sherlock Holmes-style ciphers that induced me to read it. Afterward, my passions shifted to computer science after reading the chapter on Alan Turing and his genius. Amazing read and looking forward to more :)

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What a wonderful start to your book! I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm a big fan of the the way you wove historical insights with the details of computation.

Your mention of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which especially piqued my interest. I'm looking forward to reading more of what you have to say about that topic. It's fascinating how consistently Gödel's work comes up in discussions about the differences between human and machine intelligence.

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Thanks! You're absolutely right about Gödel, and I definitely want to expand on that part of the story to better understand why computer science was an inevitable discovery after the great math crisis of the early 20th century.

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Fantastic, thank you

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This is really well done, and your students are lucky to have you.

I think I feel such a kinship to computer scientists precisely because it's such a useful lens through which to discover fundamental truths about life, or at least to talk about them. AI philosophy is philosophy, after all!

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Thanks, man. You're way too kind, as usual <3

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No way, dude. This is exactly the type of thing I would enjoy writing, but I get pulled in so many directions, it's tough for me to dive in too much. This is a very solid dive, and easy to read to boot. I know that ain't easy!

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This was just excellent. I've never come across computational irreducibility explained with such clarity and lucidity. Hilbert, Gödel, Turing... what more could you ask for!

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