Quotes About Computations

That which occasions so many mistakes in the computations of men, when they expect return for favors, is that the giver's pride and the receiver's cannot agree upon the value of the kindness done.

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.

Some things, like the orbits of the planets, can be calculated far into the future. But that's atypical. In most contexts, there is a limit. Even the most fine-grained computation can only forecast British weather a few days ahead. There are limits to what can ever be learned about the future, however powerful computers become.

José Luis Peña, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and his collaborators have discovered that the sound localization system in a barn owl's brain performs sophisticated mathematical computations to execute this pinpointing of prey.

For the same reason, he insisted on treating the sun as the centre of his system not only in the physical but in the geometrical sense, by making the distances and positions of the planets relative to the sun (and not relative to the earth or the centre C) the basis of his computations. The shift of emphasis, which was more instinctive than logical, became a major factor in his success.

Interaction works as a kind of glue for understanding. It takes all the pieces of an understanding problem—representations in the world, the tools we work with, the space around us, and the computations in our head—and weaves them together.

Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It's just irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all the manifestations of sentience have been accounted for, just because the computations don't have anything sentient in them. It's like insisting that wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren't wet.

Fantastic truths perish slower... Sappho's moon will survive the moon of Armstrong. Different computations are necessary.

Avoid holding locks during lengthy computations or operations at risk of not completing quickly such as network or console I/O.

Stale data can cause serious and confusing failures such as unexpected exceptions, corrupted data structures, inaccurate computations, and infinite loops. [2]

A block chain is a series of blocks. Each block is a series of computations done by computers all over the world using serious cryptography in a way that's very hard to undo.

He was able (this being the Depression) to buy used desk calculators cheaply from ailing banks and to hire a group of young people, through the New Deal's National Youth Administration, to do computations at fifty cents an hour.

The power of recursion evidently lies in the possibility of defining an infinite set of objects by a finite statement. In the same manner, an infinite number of computations can be described by a finite recursive program, even if this program contains no explicit repetitions.