On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 8:32 PM Keith F. Lynch <kfl@keithlynch.net> wrote:
"Adam P. Goucher" <apgoucher@gmx.com> wrote:
Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
So what would be the single number that most computer science people would recognize and acknowledge as being representative of computer science?
Chaitin's constant represents computer science in a deep way: it embodies the eventual behaviour of every computer program.
The only problem is that its numeric value depends on your choice of prefix-free encoding of computer programs.
A bigger problem is that it is uncomputable. So even if we settled on an encoding, we wouldn't know which day to celebrate.
Chaitin Omega numbers can have arbitrary length computable prefixes; see, e.g. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ChaitinsConstant.html -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike https://reperiendi.wordpress.com