“Indirection” is using something that uses something else, in its broadest sense. So your example, using a pointer of a value instead of the value, fits this definition at one level. The pointer is the something and the value is the something else. Typically this is something larger in scope: Using a web site to … Read more
Generally it means that by increasing the level of abstraction one can make the problem easier to understand/resolve. Be careful with your abstractions though, the full quote at least as I heard it is, “You can solve every problem with another level of indirection, except for the problem of too many levels of indirection”.
The reason that Turing Machines are a big deal has to do with the study of classical Computing Science or Theory of Computation type stuff. It’s basically about analyzing the general properties of a computer, such as what theoretical abilities and limitations a computer has, as well as what we mean when we talk about … Read more
The tutorial you posted here is actually doing it wrong. I double checked it against Bishop’s two standard books and two of my working implementations. I will point out below where exactly. An important thing to keep in mind is that you are always searching for derivatives of the error function with respect to a … Read more
You need some form of dynamic allocation construct (malloc ornew or cons will do) and either recursive functions or some other way of writing an infinite loop. If you have those and can do anything at all interesting, you’re almost certainly Turing-complete. The lambda calculus is equivalent in power to a Turing machine, and if … Read more
When adding two numbers (on paper or in a machine), you start with the least significant digits and work towards the most significant digits. (Same goes for many other operations). On the Intel 8088, which had 16-bit registers but an 8-bit data bus, being little-endian allowed such instructions to start operation after the first memory … Read more
From http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/stl/vector/ Vector containers are implemented as dynamic arrays; Just as regular arrays, vector containers have their elements stored in contiguous storage locations, which means that their elements can be accessed not only using iterators but also using offsets on regular pointers to elements. But unlike regular arrays, storage in vectors is handled automatically, allowing … Read more
EDIT (much later than original answer): MarkCC of Good Math, Bad Math recently wrote up an excellent discussion of the Halting problem with concrete examples. The halting problem is basically a formal way of asking if you can tell whether or not an arbitrary program will eventually halt. In other words, can you write a … Read more
A finite state transducer (FST) is a finite state automaton (FSA, FA) which produces output as well as reading input, which means it is useful for parsing (while a “bare” FSA can only be used for recognizing, i.e. pattern matching). An FST consists of a finite number of states which are linked by transitions labeled … Read more
Turing machines are theoretical concepts invented to explore the domain of computable problems mathematically and to obtain ways of describing these computations. The Von-Neumann architecture is an architecture for constructing actual computers (which implement what the Turing machine describes theoretically). Functional programming is based on the lambda-calculus, which is a another method of describing computations … Read more