Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Contrast

I probably should have left my concentration as Computer Science. I could pass the Q in that without even studying. That said, nights like tonight make me glad I switched to Stats (though maybe I should have gone all the way to Applied Math since it's the Stats questions that seem to be tripping me up the most).

So, in Set Theory, we had a wonderful discussion of some of the deepest ideas ever contemplated. The centerpiece was the continuum hypothesis proposed by Cantor. It states that there were no cardinal numbers between the countability (the naturals) and continuity (the reals). It seems like the kind of thing that would either be true or false. No deals. In the ensuing 150 years it has been tackled by the best and brightest and two things have been demonstrated: 1) you can't disprove it (Godel, 1938) and 2) you can't prove it (Cohen, 1963). It's either an axiom or a curiosity, but it doesn't follow from anything.

Skip down the hall to Evolutionary Computing. Another good lecture, but the centerpiece of this one, Quantum Selection, is the biggest pile of baloney since Donald J Trump last opened his mouth.

Sorry CS dudes, you may make the big bucks, but the math folks are waaaaay smarter than you.

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