Quotes About Computation

Understanding how to measure uncertainty is key to measuring risk. Understanding risk in a quantitative sense is key to understanding how to compute the value of information. Understanding the value of information tells us what to measure and about how much effort we should put into measuring it.

Las ideas son algoritmos y éstos no son otra cosa más que patrones organizados que contienen (en una estructura) cantidades enormes de información codificada

Algoritmización: Se refiere al proceso de obtener algoritmos a partir de la información cruda . Es un mecanismo de concentración de datos y aumento de la densidad informacional.

I take seriously the idea that we're in a simulation. I have no idea whether or not it's true, but if it is, if we are in a simulation, it's not that nothing is real, not that there are no tables and chairs and trees. Rather, it's that they exist in a different form from what we first thought. There's a level of computation underneath what we take to be physical reality.

Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery - as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.

The most important precedents deal with the whole idea of symbolic programming - the notion of setting up symbolic expressions that can represent anything one wants, and then having functions that operate on both their structure and content.

Algorithm Characteristics

If you come from mathematics, as I do, you realize that there are many problems, even classical problems, which cannot be solved by computation alone

Math is sometimes called the science of patterns.

Mathematics is a method of logic.

Quantum computation is a distinctively new way of harnessing nature. It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.

if you're using an exponential algorithm O(2n), you might want to make a cup of coffee—your routine should finish in about 10263 years. Let us know how the universe ends.

ALIQUANT  (A'LIQUANT)   adj.[aliquantus, Lat.]Parts of a number, which, however repeated, will never make up the number exactly; as, 3 is an aliquant of 10, thrice 3 being 9, four times 3 making 12.

One of the great things about mental math is that the calculations can generally be done from either direction, and a certain symmetry generally is present.

I tell you, with complex numbers you can do anything.

If you're not thinking about numbers, you're probably not thinking.

It is not of the essence of mathematics to be conversant with the ideas of number and quantity.

To me quantum computation is a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics, and hence understanding physical reality as a whole.

All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of.

We're presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today's third revolution, were coming to realize that even minds and societies emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded as computations. Everything is a computation .

Counting in octal is just likst counting in decimal--if you don't use your thumbs.

One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation.

The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself.

No sociologist should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time.