Quotes About Recursion

RECURSION [Now rare or oh.s. 16261. A backward movement, return.

Past generations were most concerned with the material side of creation: How could something come from nothing? Cosmologists now recognize another, informational side of creation. Creation of a world entails above all information. The state of everything—everywhere—at every time—must be defined. The most economical way to specify such information is through a complexity-generating recursion of physical law.

Structured programming forces us to recursively decompose a program into a set of small provable functions. We can then use tests to try to prove those small provable functions incorrect. If such tests fail to prove incorrectness, then we deem the functions to be correct enough for our purposes.

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.

It's not so much that history is simply cyclical, it seems to progress via recursive, repeated fractal patterns with minute variations.

Diaz moved as though to get out. "No, ma'am," Dox said, scoping the area. "Tell me where the phone is and you stay put. Just in case there are any unfriendlies in the area." "Behind a book called Recursion, by Blake Crouch. Level three. Fiction.

endless loop, n. See loop, endless. loop, endless, n,. See endless loop.

Suffering produces a recursion to the tribe, to one's own kind. When a lot of people suffer, tribes lose their head.

You can do anything with stacks and iteration that you can do with recursion.

I'm possessed, recursively.

Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.

Neuroscientists talk a lot about brain circuits. In fact, the word 'circuit' is probably misleading. We do not know where most circuits begin and end. And unlike an electrical circuit, brain connections are heavily reciprocal and recursive, so that a direction of information flow can be inferred but sometimes not proven.

If language A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that probably doesn't make A more powerful, because you can probably write a subroutine to do it in B. But if A supports, say, recursion, and B doesn't, that's not likely to be something you can fix by writing library functions.

that's why we need recursion here: the number of nested loops is arbitrary, and depends on the length of the sequence permuted:

This method is a bit trickier to use, though, because assigning to any self attributes within __setattr__ calls __setattr__ again, potentially causing an infinite recursion loop (and a fairly quick stack overflow exception!).

Thus the creative process is less linear than recursive. How many iterations it goes through, how many loops are involved, how many insights are needed, depends on the depth and breadth of the issues dealt with.

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.