Logic

Practicing breaking down and generalizing problems into formal logic… — Practicing breaking down and generalizing problems into formal logic… for fun. Last month I talked about using formal verification in game design and the challenge of trying to define a problem so that it can be verified. …

Ever read a fictional story that you swore could be real? I’m going to show you why and how YOU can replicate that phenomenon — Sensational and supernatural fiction can be incredible to read. But for me, there’s always been something special about a story that leaves you feeling like it very easily could have been true. That’s verisimilitude — fiction that looks like a fact. I like to think of these kinds of stories as “what ifs.”

What we know about mathematical proofs was changed by Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. — Remember the Collatz conjecture? Here’s a quick recap. Guess a positive number. If the number is even, just divide it by 2. If the number is odd, then multiply it by 3 and add 1. This makes the number even again, and you can divide it by 2 again. In…

It is a no-brainer that a word is a sequence of letters in total order, for example: HELLO where H comes first, E comes second, … — Let’s assume, a word in a parallel universe looks like a tree of letters instead of a sequence, and we cannot enumerate the letters in words anymore. Ask yourself these questions: How different would the languages look like? How much more complex would be the algorithms?

This Charge Was Leveled By Wendy Wright at Richard Dawkins — There is a video on YouTube that has amassed quite a lot of views. It features Richard Dawkins debating Wendy Wright. He is an evolutionary biologist, and she is a Creationist. Here is the video: Now, she argues that we were created. He argues that we evolved. She has…