Hm, I wonder if I could make these students more miserable by introducing a CPU that permits static operation, then clocking that with a true random number generator?
So now it has output that is deterministic from the standpoint of the CPU but nondeterministic to an outside observer. Probably wouldn’t affect the O(n) notation though, come to think of it. It would be funny though.
I did games technology at university. We had a module that was just playing board games and eventually making one. Also did an unreal engine module that ended with making a game and a cinematic.
It was awesome.
I loved learning lambda calculus (though for me it was super hard)
I never really understood the point of Lambda calculus. Why have an anonymous function? I thought it was good practice to meticulously segment code into functions and subroutines and call them as needed, rather than have some psuedo-function embedded somewhere.
See the other comments about lambdas vs. lambda calculus, but lambdas are supposed to be for incredibly simple tasks that don’t need a full function definition, things that could be done in a line or two, like simple comparisons or calling another function. This is most useful for abstractions like list filtering, mapping, folding/reducing, etc. where you usually don’t need a very advanced function call.
I was always taught in classes that if your lambda needs more than just the return statement, it should probably be its own function.
I think you’re confusing lambdas with lambda calculus. Lambda calculus is more than just anonymous functions.
To put it extremely simply, let’s just say functional programming (the implementation of lambda calculus) is code with functions as data and without shared mutable state (or side effects).
The first one increases expressiveness tremendously, the second one increases safety and optimization. Of course, you don’t need to write anonymous functions in a functional language if you don’t want to.
As for why those “pseudo-functions” are useful, you’re probably thinking of closures, which capture state from the context they are defined in. That is pretty useful. But it’s not the whole reason lambda calculus exists.
I suppose it has to do with being stateless.
I just loved learning about lambda calculus.
I think the idea is to remove complexity by never dealing with state, so you just have one long reduction till you get to the final state…
But someone who’s more into lambdas etc should speak about this and not me (a weirdo)
But you can make games that much more interesting if your algorithms are on point.
Otherwise it’s all “well I don’t know why it generated map that’s insane”. Or “well AI has this weird bug but I don’t understand where it’s coming from”.
