Bill Wadge's Blog

The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite
~ Georg Cantor

Recently NETFLIX released a documentary on mathematical concept of infinity, titled A Trip to Infinity. NETFLIX’s trip is a bad one.

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Art is what you can get away with.
– Marshall McLuhan

[All the images in this post were produced with generative AI – Midjourney,DALL-E 2, Stable diffusion.]

I’d like to give you my thoughts on the recent amazing developments in AI (Artificial Intelligence).

I’m a retired (emeritus) professor of computer science at the University of Victoria, Canada. I ought to know a bit about AI because I taught the Department’s introduction to AI course many times. 

All I can say is thank God I’m retired. I couldn’t have kept up with the breakthroughs in translation, game playing, and especially generative AI.

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Everyone’s all, “Wow, chatGPT, amazing, a real milestone, everything will change from now on”. And they’re right – but probably don’t realize that this is not the first time something like this has happened. In fact there’s been wave after wave of computing technological innovation ever since the industry got started in the 1950’s. Here are some of the waves I’ve experienced personally

I am a computer scientist (emeritus professor at the University of Victoria, Canada) with a part-time interest in rhetoric. I’m going to give you a quick tutorial in using a formula devised by Marcus Tullius Cicero. It will make articles you write to persuade people (like persuading granting authorities to fund you) more effective and memorable.

Everyone’s heard about chatGPT, the latest and most sophisticated chatbot to date.We all know it can bs proficiently about ‘soft’ topics like English literature. I decided to quiz it about a hard topic, mathematics. As you probably know, I have a PhD in math, so I won’t go easy.

The axiom of choice (AC) seems harmless enough. It says that given a family of non empty sets, there is a choice function that assigns to each set an element of that set.

AC is practically indispensable for doing modern mathematics. It is an existential axiom that implies the existence of all kinds of objects. But it gives no guidance on how to find examples of these objects. So in what sense do they exist?

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
-Frederick Douglass

When the late Ed Ashcroft and I invented Lucid, we had no idea what we were getting in for.

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Recently I was invited to give a 1-hour tutorial at the Computing in Topological Structures workshop (CTS 2022) held partially by zoom and in person in Sochi, Russia. Here are the slides plus some commentary. The whole talk turned into a very long post, so I chopped it in two. This is the first half, largely about playing infinite games (really).

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Recently I was invited to give a 1-hour tutorial at the Computing in Topological Structures workshop (CTS 2022) held partially by zoom and in person in Sochi, Russia. Here is the second part, about programming in Lucid. It will be more accessible than Part I.

When Ed Ashcroft and I invented Lucid, we intended it be a general purpose language like Pascal (very popular at the time.)

Pascal had while loops and we managed to do iteration with equations. However in Pascal you can nest while loops and have iterations that run their course while enclosing loops are frozen. This was a problem for us.

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