There's something on meta about improving questions per day
I told myself I should ask one qeustion here per day...I kept stopping myself from asking questions because I didn't know how silly they were that I just wasn't getting something
but I have to keep telling myself
if it confuses me, it probably confuses someone else out there too
I've also been very lax with studying lately (shame on me) and I blame pandas and pokemon
It took me a long while before I understood fully why the derivative of x^2 is 2x. And that's after manually figuring it out. Apparently teachers don't bother to teach why.
Do computers understand operations? Or are they simply programmed to give an output for a given input?
Does a computer understand what happens with 1+1? It will surely give me 2. But does it give me 2 because it understands what 1+1 is, or because it is programmed to return 2?
I'm about to wander dangerously close to asking if a computer is sentient. Since "understanding" something is rather vague.
Well I guess the question I should be asking myself is if there is any observable/testable difference between being able to return 2 every time 1+1 is asked, and actually understanding it.
Yeah it doesn't "understand" anything.. Just processing a long list of operations, jumping back and forth in the list and possibly one day running out.
Because I found myself in a situation where I managed to answer some math question about taylor series, simply because I executed the correct steps required to get there based on some given formula. Without actually understanding anything in between.
I'd say humans are perfectly capable of "understanding" simple arithmetic with small numbers such as 1+1, but that whole "what is intelligence" bit is always fuzzy and people never settle on an answer on it so why bother.
Well yes of course you just need to trust the underlying theory at some point and say "this works because of that".. Trace that all the way back to 1+1 and you'll go nuts.
Is it possible to (artificially) construct the word equivalent to mamihlapinatapai (a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other will offer something that they both desire but are unwilling to suggest or offer themselves)(Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word") in Japanese?
I quote wikipedia "The word consists of the reflexive/passive prefix ma- (mam- before a vowel), the root ihlapi (pronounced [iɬapi]), which means to be at a loss as what to do next, the stative suffix -n, an achievement suffix -ata, and the dual suffix -apai, which in composition with the reflexive mam- has a reciprocal sense."
reflexive - 自分; passive - られる; root (be at a loss) - 迷う; stative - ている, achievement suffix - ていた(?); dual/reciprocal sense - 相互
@sawa regarding your comment in stackoverflow.com/questions/12650164/… . 1) That souvenir was indeed from Kyoto. You can see my itinerary at gist.github.com/3154209 2) Dave was apparently claiming that a Japanese calendar year being used for an expiration date couldn't happen. I was providing him with a counterexample.