April 8, 2001 by Chris on General

Intelligent Design Theory

The Intelligent Design theory of our existence (which the Creator book draws heavily from) was attacked in an New York Times article. I was going to respond to some of it but this page does a nice job of hitting the points I was going to make. (from dm)

Ask HN: What do people use to prevent crawlers? | Hacker News -
Ask HN: HNers who got their “Show HNs” on homepage, how is your site doing now? | Hacker News -
Ask HN: If you were a coder who successfully changed careers, what do you do now? | Hacker News -

These are my links for July 20th through July 24th:

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Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures | Hacker News -
The language of choice - Propositional logic was discovered by Stoics around 300 B.C., only to be abandoned in later antiquity and rebuilt in the 19th century by George Boole’s successors. One of them, Charles Peirce, saw its significance for what we now call logic circuits, yet that discovery too was forgotten until the 1930s. In the ’50s John McCarthy invented conditional expressions, casting the logic into the form we’ll study here; then in 1986 Randal Bryant repeated one of McCarthy’s constructions with a crucial tweak that made his report “for many years the most cited paper in all of computer science, because it revolutionized the data structures used to represent Boolean functions” (Knuth).1 Let’s explore and code up some of this heritage of millennia, and bring it to bear on a suitable challenge: playing tic-tac-toe.
Then we’ll tackle a task that’s a little more practical: verifying a carry-lookahead adder circuit. Supposedly logic gets used all the time for all kinds of serious work, but for such you’ll have to consult the serious authors; what I can say myself, from working out the code to follow, is that the subject offers a fun playground plus the most primitive form of the pun between meaning and mechanism.

You’re encouraged to read with this article’s code cloned and ready

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Chris's Digital Detritus

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Day: April 8, 2001

Intelligent Design Theory