Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by clysm 1639 days ago
What a load of incoherent nonsense.

> Recursive functions and algorithms are a cornerstone of computer science, that is simply how computers work.

No, not at all.

> What is recursion? It simply means taking something you have, running it again, but running in such a way that it gets slightly better next run.

What in the...

> Even the word “Resurrections” sounds a bit like “Recursion” which might be a coincidence, yet knowing Lana’s unparalleled talent of creating meta everywhere, makes me wonder.

My eyes rolled back so hard that I'm now legally blind.

2 comments

Maybe they're confusing "recursion" with "iteration"; and "iteration" in a similar sense to iterative programming and not to loop iterations.
> Repeat it thousands or million times, and you get a far, far better result than what you started with.

I wish.

That's why I never write a stop clause in my recursive functions. Makes everything infinitely better. /s
Thank you! I will try that and see how that goes. :)

Edit: I got a stack overflow! Does that mean I should download more RAM, or what am I doing wrong?!

---

But seriously, I think the author is referring to evolutionary algorithms. It does not make much sense regardless. Smith and Trinity are crucial to account for, but the author left them out completely.

> or what am I doing wrong?!

Not using a a language implementation with tail call optimization, or recursing outside of tail position, probably.

It better be perfect though!!! At what point can I tell that it is in the most perfect state? If we are talking about infinities, is there a point where we can say that it is in a perfect state and it cannot get any more perfect? Is there such a thing as perfect state?

For example:

> It simply means taking something you have, running it again, but running in such a way that it gets slightly better next run.

So... is there an end of this? Physically speaking, there is a limit, yeah, but can we reach the most perfect state where it cannot get any better?

> is there a point where we can say that it is in a perfect state

I suspect it's asymptotical. You'll need to determine at which point it's close enough to perfection to stop improving, or just let it rip to infinity (and never benefit from it, probably).