The cantor set exists in a real phenomenon? Any real phenomenon? That makes me feel like we live in a simulation perhaps more than anything else I’ve heard. This story is a nice description of the people, but I want more on implications. What is going on here?
Also: Church encodings for integers and bootstrapping number systems from the empty set.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding
And Lisp, of course; where the book Gödel, Escher, Bach shows's up how to build a number system from empty lists:
An approximation, I’d imagine. I wouldn’t expect it to manifest in any real physical sense, any more than I’d expect an actual physical “unit circle” object to have a circumference of exactly two Pi.
gsf_emergency_2•7m ago
It's as much an approx as any physical measurement is. As for "real world" implications, Hinton probably deserves the physics Nobel more than (the) Hofstadter who predicted this phenom (as a grad student)
hawkjo•1h ago
anthk•42m ago
Also: Church encodings for integers and bootstrapping number systems from the empty set. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding And Lisp, of course; where the book Gödel, Escher, Bach shows's up how to build a number system from empty lists:
https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/church_encoding.html
taneq•29m ago
gsf_emergency_2•7m ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_butterfly#:~:te...