I'm going to present something about the exact sciences to high-school
students I never met. In the area of mathematics or computer science,
what would be a nice short presentation? What is the computer about?

My best idea for the moment is to present what the computer does par excellence. What does the computer do par excellence? I think it's simulations. I have a personal story involving a simulation that sort
of shows what the computer is about.

When I was very young (about 8 years old or something like that), there
was a very charming person in the building I lived who invited me to
play a card game called WAR. We went to the playground and I was taught
the game, which was very simple even for an 8-year-old. It turns out
the game was very boring even to an 8-year-old. You split the deck of
cards and each player takes half of the deck. Cards faced down. Now
each player puts a card face up on the table. The player with the
highest card wins the table. If it ties, then the table accumulates and
each player opens up a new card until one wins. The objective of the
game is to win all your opponent's cards. We played with two decks of
cards, which made the game last a long time. I did not ever want to
play it again. So it stayed with me that this is the most boring card
game I ever.

Anyway, many years later now I was one weekend at my sister's and
talking to my nephews I came up with the idea---hey, wanna play the most
boring card ever? You know children. They said a loud---YES! So we
did it. Remarkably, they seemed to enjoy themselves and competed
against each other. (They never played it again, though!)

Anyway, that was on a Sunday. I came back home at the end of the day
and kept thinking about that game for the first time. I asked
myself---could this game ever repeat on forever? You see, I was worried
with my nephews that I'd be stuck at that table forever. Luckily, the
game ended again about half-hour later. (We played with a single deck
of cards.)

So I decided to make a simulation. I wrote the code and ran the game.
What I found surprised me. On the computer, after the two players's
cards were face up on the table, the player who won the table would take
the cards all in the order they were placed. The fact that this order
was not changed seemed to have made the game very likely to repeat on
forever. Using a sample of 1000 game runs, the probability that a game
would end was 0.128, about 13%. So the probability of a never-ending
game seems to be about 87%.

I then decided to run the game such that the player who won would
shuffle the cards before putting them back at the end of his stack of
cards. Doing the simulation this way results in the game ending nearly always---99% probability. Now, I'm saying 99% because I simply did not
find a single game run that went on forever. (But I don't think the probability is 100%. But the statatistic /is/ 100%.)

I asked myself---why does the shuffling make the game likely to end? I
don't know.

Bottom-line is that the computer is a lot of fun. It can see things
that we would likely never see it ourselves without it.

And that's my idea for the presentation. It's about the computer. It's
about what I think the computer does best---simulate other things. And
it's about very interesting things such as probability.

It's personal. It's real. And it's funny: I was an 8-year-old very
excited to play a new game, but then I realized the game just kept me
staring along the luck of each half of the deck for about an hour. :)
(But it was worth it! The game was boring, but my opponent was very interesting.)

Any cool ideas you might want to suggest me? Thanks!

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Johanne Fairchild <jfairchild@tudado.org> writes:
<snip>

So I decided to make a simulation. I wrote the code and ran the game.
What I found surprised me. On the computer, after the two players's
cards were face up on the table, the player who won the table would take
the cards all in the order they were placed. The fact that this order
was not changed seemed to have made the game very likely to repeat on forever. Using a sample of 1000 game runs, the probability that a game
would end was 0.128, about 13%. So the probability of a never-ending
game seems to be about 87%.

I then decided to run the game such that the player who won would
shuffle the cards before putting them back at the end of his stack of
cards. Doing the simulation this way results in the game ending nearly always---99% probability. Now, I'm saying 99% because I simply did not
find a single game run that went on forever. (But I don't think the probability is 100%. But the statatistic /is/ 100%.)

I asked myself---why does the shuffling make the game likely to end? I
don't know.

In your sample set of two real-world games, both games ended. Based on
your initial simulation, there's about a 1.6% chance that in two games,
both would end -- lucky, I guess?

As a child, I played War plenty of times, and while I'm sure we gave up
on some games, I believe most of them ended. I certainly don't remember
giving up on 9/10ths of them as unwinnable.

This would lead me to believe that your initial simulation was
flawed.

First, I'd want to know how you determined that a game was "unending" --
since by definition such a game could continue indefinitely, you must
have selected a number at which you'd "give up" on the game. How did you
pick that number?

Secondly, I'm a bit confused by your assertion that collecting the cards unshuffled would make the game "very likely to repeat".

I'd hesitate to use this example for your presentation because many of
the students in your audience will have played War, and they will
probably balk at your initial simulation's results the same way I did
("9 out of 10 games of War will never end? That doesn't sound
right"). Also, although you got different results due to shuffling, you
don't have any idea *why*, which is unsatisfying. So the moral of your
story is that, using the computer, you were able to get two answers
which don't actually make any sense.

john

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John <john@building-m.simplistic-anti-spam-measure.net> writes:

First, I'd want to know how you determined that a game was "unending" -- since by definition such a game could continue indefinitely, you must
have selected a number at which you'd "give up" on the game. How did you
pick that number?

Sorry, I shouldn't have leapt to the most naive implementation here: you
could have also implemented some sort of detection for "loops".

Would be interested to see the code, by the way.

john

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On Thu, 21 Mar 2024, John wrote:

John <john@building-m.simplistic-anti-spam-measure.net> writes:

First, I'd want to know how you determined that a game was "unending" --
since by definition such a game could continue indefinitely, you must
have selected a number at which you'd "give up" on the game. How did you
pick that number?

Sorry, I shouldn't have leapt to the most naive implementation here: you could have also implemented some sort of detection for "loops".

Would be interested to see the code, by the way.

john

Based on he youngest people I teach they seem to be very interested in
hacking and crypto currencies.

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Johanne Fairchild <jfairchild@tudado.org> wrote or quoted:

I asked myself---why does the shuffling make the game likely to end?

Periodicity (getting into a loop) often is not stable. When you
start at noon and repeatedly add 12 hours, then you get the
repeating sequence "noon - midnight - noon - midnight - ...".
But if instead you add 12 hours plus a random time (even a small
one), the outcome nearly always will not be periodic anymore.

Now, imagine that there is some "end rule". For example,
the addition stops, once a time between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. is
reached. With the periodic sequence "noon - midnight - noon -
midnight - ..." this end interval will /never/ be reached.
But when a random time is added, it should often be reached.

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kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote or quoted:

I explained to the CIO of a large government agency that a particular
system wasn't a computer at all because it wasn't a finite automaton,

What is a computer?

Is this your own definition, or did you quote it from someone else?

Are there any other definitions?

How do you know which definition to choose as the correct one?

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Johanne Fairchild <jfairchild@tudado.org> wrote:

I'm going to present something about the exact sciences to high-school >students I never met. In the area of mathematics or computer science,
what would be a nice short presentation? What is the computer about?

I'd get even more fundamental and explain what a computer actually is,
because most people seem to have no actual idea.

I explained to the CIO of a large government agency that a particular
system wasn't a computer at all because it wasn't a finite automaton,
and they had no idea what I was talking about. It turned out the whole
notion of fetch/decode/execute/store had never been explained to them
and they didn't really know what a computer was.

It is best to nip this in the bud, hopefully in middle school, but
high school is better than nothing.

Once you do that you can talk about what to use it for.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:

kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote or quoted:

I explained to the CIO of a large government agency that a particular >>system wasn't a computer at all because it wasn't a finite automaton,

What is a computer?

Is this your own definition, or did you quote it from someone else?

Are there any other definitions?

How do you know which definition to choose as the correct one?

Great questions.

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Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote or quoted:

I explained to the CIO of a large government agency that a particular >>system wasn't a computer at all because it wasn't a finite automaton,

What is a computer?

It's a finite automaton.

Is this your own definition, or did you quote it from someone else?

I like to quote from Andrew Tennanbaum's book on the subject.

Are there any other definitions?

I suppose there are, since there are people whose job title is "computer"
and we do have devices like the B-29 fire control computer which compute
but are not actually finite automata.

Our computer security people wanted us to put encryption software on E-6B
slide rules because they were on the inventory as "portable computers."

How do you know which definition to choose as the correct one?

I think in the 21st century, everyone assumes a computer to be a finite automaton or something mathematically equivalent. That is, turing-machine- equivalent except for having a finite length tape.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote or quoted:

Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote or quoted:

I explained to the CIO of a large government agency that a particular >>>system wasn't a computer at all because it wasn't a finite automaton,

What is a computer?

It's a finite automaton.

Is this your own definition, or did you quote it from someone else?

I like to quote from Andrew Tennanbaum's book on the subject.

Are there any other definitions?

I suppose there are, since there are people whose job title is "computer"
and we do have devices like the B-29 fire control computer which compute
but are not actually finite automata.
Our computer security people wanted us to put encryption software on E-6B >slide rules because they were on the inventory as "portable computers."

How do you know which definition to choose as the correct one?

I think in the 21st century, everyone assumes a computer to be a finite >automaton or something mathematically equivalent. That is, turing-machine- >equivalent except for having a finite length tape.

Thanks for answering my questions!

I couldn't find a definition from Tanenbaum on the question that
includes the word "automaton", but here's a quotation from Tanenbaum:

|A digital computer is a machine that can do work for people
|by carrying out instructions given to it.
"Structured Computer Organization", Tanenbaum and Austin 2012.

In science, a writer is free to define terms as seen fit
usually given the meaning in his work. Here's an example,

|For the purposes of this paper, we can define a computer as
|any machine equivalent to a Turing machine.
"A Critique of Pure Computation: Against Strong AI and
Computationalism", Causey (2022?).

Some people having read such sentences forget about "For the
purposes of this paper, we can define" and only remember,
"a computer [i]s any machine equivalent to a Turing machine"!

I asked a chatbot,

|Is there a name for the fallacy that a word must have the
|meaning in general English that it has in some scientific
|terminology?
me (Stefan Ram) asking a chatbot (2024),

he answered:

|Based on the search results, there does not appear to be a
|specific named fallacy for the assumption that a word must
|have the same meaning in general English as it does in some
|scientific terminology. However, this type of fallacy could
|be considered a form of the referential fallacy.
|
|The referential fallacy is described as "assuming that all
|words refer to existing things and that the meaning of words
|resides within the words themselves, as opposed to words
|possibly referring to no real object or that the meaning
|comes from how they are used."
|
|In the case of a word having a different meaning in
|scientific vs. general usage, the fallacy would be assuming
|that the scientific meaning is the only valid or "real"
|meaning of the word, rather than recognizing that the meaning
|can vary depending on the context. This is a flawed
|assumption about the nature of language and meaning.
|
what the chatbot answered (2024).

. FWIW, here I have gathered some definitions:

|computer
|
|A functional unit that can perform substantial computations,
|including numerous arithmetic operations and logic operations
|without human intervention.
|
ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993: Information technology -- Vocabulary --
Part 1: Fundamental terms

|computer n. 1. A device that computes, especially a
|programmable electronic machine that performs high-speed
|mathematical or logical operations or that assembles, stores,
|correlates, or otherwise processes information. 2. One who
|computes. — n. attributive. Often used to modify another
|noun: computer programming; computer software.
an English dictionary

|A computer is a machine that can be programmed to
|automatically carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical
|operations (computation).
a Web encyclopedia

|Computer: A data processor
"The Art of Computer Programming", Donald Knuth 1969

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Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

I couldn't find a definition from Tanenbaum on the question that
includes the word "automaton", but here's a quotation from Tanenbaum:

The definition I was thinking of was the mathematical one, and you don't
really want to give it to high school students. Your best bet is probably
to define it by example... showing a computer with a handful of instructions and how it pulls an instruction pointed to by the program counter from memory, decodes that instruction (and you can show a code card with the instruction set), executes it, and then goes on to the next instruction.

When I was a student everybody liked to use the PDP-8 for this since it
only has seven instructions. Personally I like to use the 8051 since
although it's more complex, they are in keyboards and microwave ovens and
all kinds of different places where people don't expect computers to be.
You could use a PIC too if you liked.

You could talk about turing machines and turing equivalence but it would
take so much handwaving to do it in such a short time that it wouldn't be
worth the trouble to my mind.

|For the purposes of this paper, we can define a computer as
|any machine equivalent to a Turing machine.
"A Critique of Pure Computation: Against Strong AI and
Computationalism", Causey (2022?).

Right, but once you do this, then you have to explain a Turing machine and that's harder than explaining a simple computer. Yes, we did see how to
factor a number with a Turing machine in college because gus baird was that kind of guy, but this is not something to talk about in a one-hour school lecture.

It's a turing machine, it's a pushdown automaton, it's a conventional computer... no need to go through the proofs.

The cool thing is that the combination of conditionals and branches allow
you to "make decisions" and this is what makes algorithms possible. A
machine that just went down a tape executing instructions one at a time
until the tape ended might be useful, but far less useful than a real
computer.

This is easiest to show by example.

The computer is just a box of nand gates, and yet it can do all this
fantastic stuff. But it's really just nand gates inside there. Isn't
that great?

I could do everything with a single instruction and no decoding too.
Or with a stack-based machine. Or with a VLIW machine. But they all
can be made to do the exact same thing in the end and they all can be
made from boxes of nand gates.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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In article <Q9P3eLBZy7cnWdcu5@bongo-ra.co>,
Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> wrote:

On 24 Mar 2024 01:49:31 -0000
kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote or quoted:

I explained to the CIO of a large government agency that a particular
system wasn't a computer at all because it wasn't a finite automaton,

You don't say what the context of the discussion was but I assume that some >practical issue was concerned. I can't think of a practical situation where >the most useful reply is around the lines of whether the system involved is a >computer or a finite automaton.

In this case it was about whether quantum computers had to run the mandatory
IT department monitoring software. I maintained that since quantum computers like analogue computers aren't really "computers" and can't run software as
we think of it, that this would be impossible.

Our computer security people wanted us to put encryption software on E-6B
slide rules because they were on the inventory as "portable computers."

Is this the same thing as the CIO discussion you mention above or something >else ? Anyway , if someone wanted to install any kind of software on slide >rules and they didn't know that "portable computers" in this context refers >to slide rules , I would point out to them that it does. If they did know that >slide rules were involved and they seriously wanted to install software on >them , I would be at a loss for words.

We had to destroy the E-6Bs because the rules say that computers have to
have whole-disk encryption and the E-6B could not support whole-disk encryption.

We also had to get rid of a bunch of computers that did not have disks
and could not boot off disk, because such machines could not support
whole-disk encryption.

Because it is important to follow the rules. The security people did not
care about whether the system was secure or not because it was not their
job to do so. It was their job to enforce the rules.

I don't know who "everyone" is. I don't think that most people or even most >IT professionals bother to think of a general definition for "computer". >Ultimately the question is philosophical. Is the human mind a computer ? Is >the whole universe a computer ? I only think of "finite automaton" or "Turing >machine" in connection with mathematical theorems. For practical computing >purposes I don't think they are useful terms.

What is a computer and what is not a computer? A rock is not a computer,
a lawnmower is not a computer. If you ask kids, they all know what is a computer and what is not a computer but they cannot define it and they do
not know why a computer is a computer. Sometimes they get confused on what appear to be edge cases like cellphones.

Is the human mind a computer? That question then devolves down to "can the human mind be emulated as a finite automaton?" because it is provable that
the human mind can emulate a finite automaton (in at least the case of
at least half the students I ask to trace through some code). The answer
to this question is worth a Nobel prize at least, and possibly a Turing
award as well.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:

In article <Q9P3eLBZy7cnWdcu5@bongo-ra.co>,
Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> wrote:

Is this the same thing as the CIO discussion you mention above or
something else ? Anyway , if someone wanted to install any kind of >>software on slide rules and they didn't know that "portable
computers" in this context refers to slide rules , I would point out
to them that it does. If they did know that slide rules were
involved and they seriously wanted to install software on them , I
would be at a loss for words.

We had to destroy the E-6Bs because the rules say that computers have
to have whole-disk encryption and the E-6B could not support
whole-disk encryption.

Ah, what I've referred to as "check box security" for quite some time
now.

We also had to get rid of a bunch of computers that did not have
disks and could not boot off disk, because such machines could not
support whole-disk encryption.

Because it is important to follow the rules. The security people did not care about whether the system was secure or not because it was not their
job to do so. It was their job to enforce the rules.

Well, in a way yes, but their way of "enforcing" them is to have a
multi-page form full of check boxes and labels. And if they can put a
check in each box next to a given label (such as "whole disk
encrypted") then they have "secured" the system.

I.e., "check box security".

The security folks don't know security from a hole in the ground, and
could not "secure" a master lock if they had the key, but they can
"check the boxes" on their standard "security compliance forms" -- and
if all the boxes get checked for "thing X", then "thing X" must be
"secure".

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Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> wrote:

... Anyway , if someone wanted to install any kind of software on slide
rules and they didn't know that "portable computers" in this context refers to slide rules , I would point out to them that it does.

Or, don't point anything out. Instead hand them a box filled with
slide rules and tell them to go right ahead and /install/ all the
software they want onto them.

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On Thu, 21 Mar 2024 14:57:09 -0300, Johanne Fairchild wrote:

What is the computer about?

The computer is the “universal machine”. On its own, it doesn’t do very much: you have to write programs to tell it what to do. Those programs can
make it solve any problem for which you can write down the rules of the solution--particularly if the rules are so long and complex that no human
being would have a hope of being able to carry them out manually.

So the computer is about automation of tasks. Nowadays, most people do
things on computers through point-and-click (or point-and-tap) GUIs. Those
are great for performing canned tasks, that have already been
preprogrammed into the app. They are not so good for automating more
complex sequences built out of those canned tasks. That’s where concepts
like “scripting” and the “command line” come in.

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Spiros Bousbouras:

Correction : finite automata are useful for implementing
regular expression engines.

Yes, and regular expressions are one of their many
applications:

<https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html> <https://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser>

--
() ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail
/\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments

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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote at 23:00 this Tuesday (GMT):

On Thu, 21 Mar 2024 14:57:09 -0300, Johanne Fairchild wrote:

What is the computer about?

The computer is the “universal machine”. On its own, it doesn’t do very much: you have to write programs to tell it what to do. Those programs can make it solve any problem for which you can write down the rules of the solution--particularly if the rules are so long and complex that no human being would have a hope of being able to carry them out manually.

So the computer is about automation of tasks. Nowadays, most people do
things on computers through point-and-click (or point-and-tap) GUIs. Those are great for performing canned tasks, that have already been
preprogrammed into the app. They are not so good for automating more
complex sequences built out of those canned tasks. That’s where concepts like “scripting” and the “command line” come in.

And that's why bash (and theoretically BAT) scripts are so powerful,
since it can range from just running a series of commands to complex conditionals and piping and such.
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom

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On 24 Mar 2024 11:06:29 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

I asked a chatbot,

Stopped reading at that point.

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