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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, November 27 2012 @ 02:30 PM EST |
At first i was leaning with Wol here on the definition of an algorithm. i wrote
out several arguements and refuted many of them. I just about convinced myself
to take IANALitj's side of the disagreement.
The point you (Wol) made was of calculating pi. But is there a program out there
that calculates pi? or rather is there a program that finds the next n-digits of
pi given the first m-digits?
Similarly, we can't write a program to find _all_ prime numbers, because as it
can be proven, there are infinitely many prime numbers (just as there are
infinitely many digits in pi). We can however write a program to give us the
next prime number or a larger prime number, but not all of them.
However, I fail to see in IANALitj's original argument how there is more to a
program than a collection of algorithms.
[see other poster's comment about the difference between program and
program-ming][ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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