4/16/17 - Lambda Equivalence and Manacher’s Algo

Happy Easter:

• I actually spent until 1 this morning looking at Lisp NYC’s “Lambda Equivalence” talk by Jay Sulzberger. It’s really fascinating, even though some parts are hard to follow. However, I was able to understand a good portion of it! He even did talk about alpha and beta reduction, which is amazing!

Other things he talks about in which I’m highly interested in learning more about:

• Abelian groups

• Semi-groups

• Monoids

• Ordered rings

• Meta-calculus

• Mu-Recursive functions -> See Ackermann’s function

• Reverse Beta-reduction

• Ada rule

• Hilbert Deductive System

• Tail call optimization

• Aleph zero

Having just started exploring equivalence through the course on Correctness helped a lot! He also spoke about things that don’t seem to make much sense (I call them currently un-intuitive to me), such as implications. I thoroughly enjoyed his talk, and he is quite the character!

Solving palindromic substrings

I was reading about Manacher’s Algorithm today. It’s pretty interesting. It had me thinking about ways to find palindromic substrings….

Imagine a word that is odd or even. How would we check recursively that it is a palindrome? I’m checking by dividing the word (depending on odd or even) into two and checking either side, walking down the length of the word, comparing either side. I have another one example of my thought-process with marker on it, but that’s for another day.

Easter

• Yeah..so there’s Easter. I’ll be by a friend for half the day, but I anticipate coming back in the evening and finishing up a quiz. In the meantime, I’ll be making notes for the readings in anticipation of the quiz. I like doing the readings first, giving myself some time so I can muse about it, before I come back to the quiz. It’s not due until the 23rd, but I’d like to get it done today or at most tomorrow, so I can focus on my lab.

Other thoughts

• Although I’m enjoying the learning, I don’t think I’d be happy as a web-developer. I am learning because it’s a tool that helps me make things, but I don’t feel the same excitement as others designing websites or talking about a JS library.

• That being said, I’m giddy over functional programming, C++, logic, mathematics and category theory, or patterns with numbers in general, and I like puzzles. I don’t know what the future will hold for me, but I hope that I can find a way to combine everything. I hope I won’t be “that crying web designer” hahaha. You know, the one who makes kind of okay but crappy websites, and then goes into a corner and cries? :P

Bugs