Dana Scott on Lambda Calculus

Talks in 2016. One at UCL in London

The audio is rubbish on this, but it's mostly intelligible. Except at crucial points like 27:24. What's the matter with people? Why doesn't anyone ever talk about how eta was described in Church's 1936 "Unsolvable problem" paper? It was basically reverse beta reduction.

 

See An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory by Alonzo Church; American Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 58, No. 2. (Apr., 1936), pp. 345-363.

Subscribe to UCL Computer Science.

One at the Simons Institute in California a few months later:

See https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/stochastic-lambda-calculus. In this talk he just brushes off extensionality and eta conversion 10:02 he says basically that it means "everything is a function" but he says he needs partial functions, so he rejects that rule.

Subscribe to Simons Institute.

I think students in Ljubljana are probably doing better at arithmetic than the ones in London and Berkeley. See Brady Haran interview with Terence Tao.

This was recorded on July 19, 2022 in Baja California, Mexico. 

See also: 

I still can't bear to listen to Sabine's crap! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

John Searle's Chinese Room Argument

Image
He's fed up with talking about this. I used to have a copy of the little book he wrote called Minds, Brains & Science. Apparently the AI at Google has read it too and gets it completely: How does stuff like this happen? Most people won't even notice what I'm saying even if I point out that the Google search changed the title. The book was really called Minds, Brains & Science , not Minds, Brains & Programs . (But maybe that was a later edition or something?) I asked Google and it said: John Searle's book Minds, Brains and Science did not become "Minds, Brains & Programs"—rather, they are two separate, distinct works published a few years apart: "Minds, Brains, and Programs" (1980): A landmark academic paper published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. This is where Searle first introduced his famous Chinese Room Argument to challenge the concept of "strong AI". "Minds, Brains and Science" (1984): A shor...
Read more

Tensor Fields and Simplicial Complexes

Image
Listening to Freya Holmér last night I started to get glimmers of an idea I had long ago about how to represent vector spaces in computational processes using this recursive abstract type :  abstype 'a point = POINT   of {getx :  'a vector,       diff :  'a point -> 'a point,       move :  'a point -> 'a point,       scale : 'a -> 'a point,       proj :  'a point -> 'a} with    fun new i (op +) (op -) (op * ) dot =    let fun self x =  POINT       {getx = x,        move = fn (POINT pr) =>           (self (x + (#getx pr))),        diff = fn (POINT pr) =>          self (x - (#getx pr)),        scale = fn i =>          (self (x * i)),        proj = fn (POINT pr) =>     ...
Read more

FUTO FUBS

Image
I think this is the first time they've actually publicly announced anything about this project. See these posts: Eron Woolf on Why Open Source is Failing Matt Mikhailov and Vincent McKibbon on The Problem with Open Hardware Jason Kridner talking About BeagleBoard.org and Software Development .  See these places:  https://danielc.dev/rk/ https://github.com/petabyt/rk https://github.com/futo-org/ret See also  https://pine64.org/devices/pinebook_pro/ . Subscribe to  FUTO .  See  https://github.com/nir9/low-level-learning-resources/tree/master/setups/debian . Subscribe to  Nir Lichtman .  If you're looking for a cool init process, try  https://ctx.graphics/terminal/ . See  Artful Bytes - When to Use a RTOS  and  How to Create a Successful Open Source Project . 
Read more