Friday, June 22, 2007

Quines

Quines are really intriguing things. In computer programming it means a program that print itself, reading its source file and printing is a trivial thing. Do try the exercise it is a fun thing to do.

Quines are named after "Willard Van Orman Quine" an American Mathematician and Philosopher. He gave Quine's Paradox. The paradox means that a statement can be paradoxical without having reference (e.g. This sentence is false ) or Demonstratives e.g.

The statement to below is true
The statement to above is false

The basic funda is to take a phrase, put it in quotation and append it after quotation and the resultant sentence should be grammatically correct. i.e. make a sentence like "X"X
e.g. take a phrase 'has three words' so our sentence would be:

"has three words" has three words

“yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation” yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation
(This one was from Mr. Quine)

Not all of them will be paradoxical but they are interesting enough to mull over

is some fixed point theorem which states that in any sufficiently powerful language (programming or natural language) it is possible to construct Quines.

Here are some more for fun:

"is a sentence with no subject" is a sentence with no subject

"is a Quine statement" is a Quine statement

"is a sentence fragment" is a sentence fragment

2 comments:

desh said...

didnt get till i read th last 3 lines

ppl are so thalua, remember the buffalo thng :)

TheQuark said...

@desh: No problems. One should appreciate non practical beauties. Things to be looked at, appreciated, gorged, played and fondled in your mind and not necessary worryin too much about how would it contribute to organizational revenue, kasht-mar shatishfaction & personal skill set enhancement