Word people like finding out stuff, so they search - as the many exhortations to google here attest - and so we frequently employ Boolean operators . And so, the inquisitive person that I am, with an interest in biogs, googled... and came up with this:
""Boolean" honors George Boole, a 19th-century British mathematician who suggested that logical thought could be expressed as algebra. As you'll see below, it seems logical."
and this:
"Yes, George Boole (1815-1864) was an English mathematician who helped establish a field of mathematical study called symbolic logic. This system, known as Boolean logic, is basic to the design of digital computer circuits. It also is the basis for computer database searches. Bacause many Internet search engines are based on Boolean logic, so it is important to understand how this system works."
So I thought I'd share it so we could all be thankful together.
Alexis, all computer programs employ Boolean logic. All search engines, by definition, must use it. As soon as you enter your search terms, the search engine must use a statement like "Return the page's URL if the metadata on the HTML page contains these terms".
And while Georgie came up with the idea of "computation logic", Ada Lovelace (no relation to Linda) actually used to it sketch out programs for Babbage's analytical engine. While I've never studied her programs, I'm assured they were very sophisticated.
My encyclopedia says Boole was professor of math at University in Cork, Ireland.
i heard long, long ago, (i learned binary, within a year of JFK being shot, in elementary school, more years ago, than i would like to acknowledge)i heard that there was a strong underpinning of theology to boolian logic.
Boolian logic employes binary math, where there are two values,let's call them 1 and 0(zero). God is represented by 1, because, with out god, there is nothing.
a weird tangent : for Knitter only
some of the rules for binary math and boolian logic, are similar to knitting.
in knitting there are only two stitches, knit, and purl. to know what you are looking at, you need to know which is the front, and which is the back, because a knit, from behind looks like a purl, and a purl, looks like a knit. this duality, and the idea that information can be or can not be, depending on how you are looking at it, is part of boolian logic.
there are other similarities to knitting and binary math, but this is a real tangent.. and i don't know how many of us wordies are also knitters!
...i don't know how many of us wordies are also knitters!Guilty as charged, ot.
I'm glad you threw in that tangent... I had never thought of it that way before.
My encyclopedia says Boole was professor of math at University in Cork, Ireland.
The web notes: As it turns out, his life story is a good example of what can happen when you combine some intelligence with a lot of hard work. I find it inspiring and hope you will also. The story is much better told in a book than in anything I can find on the web. Brief exerpts here (ellipses omitted) from Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell (1937) do not really do it justice.
.....He was born in 1815 and was the son of a petty shopkeeper [,which] at that time was to be damned by foreordination. The whole class to which Boole's father belonged was treated with a contempt a trifle more contemptuous than that reserved for enslaved scullery maids and despised second footmen. A child in Boole's station should so live as never to transgress the strict limits of obedience imposed by that remarkable testimonial to human conceit and class-conscious snobbery.
.....To say that Boole's early struggles to educate himself into a station above that to which 'it had pleased God to call him' were a fair imitation of purgatory is putting it mildly. Making a pathetically mistaken diagnosis of the abilities which enabled the propertied class to goven those beneath them, Boole decided [at age 8] that he must learn Latin and Greek if he was ever to get his feet out of the mire. By the age of twelve he had mastered enough Latin (he had also taught himself Greek) to translate an ode of Horace into English verse. This precipitated a scholarly row. A classical master denied that a boy of twelve could have produced such a translation. Boole was humiliated and resolved to supply the defciencies of his self-instruction.
.....By the age of sixteen he saw that he must contribute at once to the support of his wretched parents [and took a job as an assistant teacher for four years. After that time] he had acquired a mastery of French, German, and Italian, [and] in his twentieth year Boole opened up a civilized school of his own.
.....To prepare his pupils properly he had to teach them some mathematics. His interest was aroused. It must be remembered that he had had no mathematical training beyond the rudiments. To get some idea of his mental capacity we can imagine the lonely student of twenty mastering, by his own unaided efforts, the Méchanique céleste of Laplace, one of the toughest masterpieces ever written for a conscientious student to assimilate, full of gaps and enigmatical declarations that 'it is easy to see'. Yet Boole, self-taught, found his way and saw what he was doing.
.....[For 14 years] Boole went on with the drudgery of elementary teaching, without a complaint, because his parents were now wholly dependent on his support. [He did his mathematical work solely 'on the side'.]
.....At last he got an opportunity. He was appointed Profeessor of Mathematics at the recently opened Queen's College at Cork, Ireland [at the age of 34. Fifteen years later he was dead.]
re: I had never thought of it that way before.
what's it? Boolian logic? or Knitting?
i tend to be a visual learner, i need to be able to literally or virtually see them.. once a saw boolian logic as knitting (a thread or theme link all the logic together!) and that information can in it, flow forward or backward, and that one's view point make all the difference..
i am 'old school' and still tend to think as the knit side of a garment as the 'outside' and hte purl side as the inside. but, slowly i am comming round to seeing both sides, as just sides. mind you knitting is value neutral, so its easier to see both sides as valid.1>0 expresses the same idea as 0<1.. it doesn't matter which term, (0 or 1) comes first the relationship remains the same. the back of purl is a knit, the back of knit is a purl.
This may be a foolish leap to a further connection between making of "fabric' (knitting) and boolean logic, but:
Weren't the old IBM punchcards an adaption of a technology that was first used to control weaving in cloth-mills? Jacquard mills, or something like that?
Referring back to my southern neighbour's comments (ie Kiwi!) - I know all search engines use Boolean logic, I guess I meant that when doing a search the searcher themselves doesn't always consciously use AND, NOT, or OR, for example - and that sometimes, search engines don't allow for the full range of operators (does google allow 'ADJ'? I've never tried)
The professional search engines certainly do. Google must, although they don't skite about it. So does Lycos, and they
do skite about that. Read all about it at:
http://www.lycos.com/help/boolean_help.htmlThey use the more advanced operators to be able to assign probabilities of match or percentage of match to work out what order in which to return the pages found. And they have to do it quickly! Most of the advanced operators (such as ADJ, NEAR, FAR, SAME) are not actually Boolean at all, but have been developed as part of search engine logic.
it hard to say what the searchers know..
we had a thread not to long ago on chauffers.. they used to be the "fire men" that keep a steam engine running on a steam car.. A man might drive his own car, but they were so unreliable, the chauffer, maintained the engine, repaired the flats, and then came to actually drive the car In the beginning, there was real prestige in 'driving' knowing how to work the machinery itself.
25 years ago, as the digit computer became available ( earlier computers were analog computers, with vacuum tubes were never user friendly sized) and a revolution started. the first computer users had to do everything.. there were no mice, no autostart's, at first, not even an autoexec.bat! by the early eighties, computers were becoming a fad, there were PC's and Apples, and Commadores, TRS80's, Osbornes, TI99/4A's a raft of different computers, many with some fundimental differences. some like the commadore, TRS, and Osborns used intel's 8086 chip(it later gave rise to 80286, later the (80)386, (80)486, Pentium, Pentium plus, and so on. Apples used a different chip, and so did the TI99/4A.
with different operating systems come different versions of basic, and other early programing languages..
owning a computer in the early 1980 was a for hobbiest, and people who were genuinely interested in them. (yeah, i got mine in 1982) You had to know stuff, like about registers, or bits, you often had to type in your own programs.. because they had not yet standardize floppies and floppy formats (now day, both Apple/Mac &PC use the same formate for disks.. back then they didn't so you bought unformated disk, and formated them for yourself) and size (you might know DD/SS as different day/same s***, but it used to mean double density/single sided.. but you could also have single density, double sided, and ds/dd.
by 1982 floppies did mean the 5.25 inch media storage formate, (the old 8 inch square disks where things of the past.--yeah, the first floppies where the size of sheet of paper, and didn't hold much more that a few pages worth of text!
Flash to today. there are old timers like me, who know boolian because we actually used it, long ago, in the deep dark computer past. we actualy did things like signal trace, or debug by using boolian. we knew how many registers we he had to work with, and how many bytes, and we knew memory address-sometimes in hex, sometimes in octal, sometimes in binary.
then there are users like my ex, who really likes AOL (i am not a charter aol user, but i started with a long time ago, after 3 other isp providers failed, and i wanted something stable. Is is my back up now, i think of getting someone to host my own site, and registering a domain name, and maybe, at the end of the summer, when i move i will.
but there are many like my ex.. who like aol because he doesn't actually have to know anything to use it..
he likes aol keywords... so much easier than doing a search.
he doesn't like google.. it seems to complecated.. yahoo has all those menu choices.. its easy..
he took a sabatical, and became a NYC certified computer teacher.. and he learned how to teach basic. (not vb, but basic) he teaches kids to write a program in basic, a tic tac toe program.. that is the only program he can write.
he know, and can define terms like bits and bytes, and binary, he might even recognize a hex number if he saw one..
but, fact is, he now loves playing with his computer, and going on line and chatting and looking at the manchester gaurdian on line.. all the math and logic, he doesn't know, doesn't want to know, and he is very happy and for his purposes, a very skilled user.
There were four of us, ex, me, and two kids.. and today, even though we had a home computer in the house starting in the fall of 1982, the are four levels of users. My son is total professional, and knows perl, unix, linex, and a score of other languages. he writes web pages for a living.
i am a seat of the pants solid technical person. i teach adults to use software, and develop little things.. buttons and other user friendly interface components. My daughter is a skilled user of applications. she is project co-ordinator (one of 4 working with project manager) on an international project. (an admin aid/secretary position really for all of its glorified title.) my ex, is an aol fan.
we all own and use computers 3 of us have a PDA, and i have an psion, a PDA that is a full pocket sized computer (an 8086 actually!-- just like back in the early 80's) my son has a three computer household, and for awhile, had a network, running on a Sun system. i think we are about normal. nowdays more than 70%of households at our income level have PC's. our abilities cover a far range.
BB users, are in general, slightly more skilled. most here, at awad, tend to have a need/desire to learn. so your comment, I meant that when doing a search the searcher themselves doesn't always consciously use AND, NOT, or OR, for example - is true. because they don't know how.. they either learn, because they want to, or they learn to use tools like AOL's keywords, and have smaller but easier choices.
there is no right or wrong..
"Over Forked River. Course Lakehurst."
- Last wireless message of the Hindenburg
The Lone Haranguer
the person know as Keiva, who recently posted on this thread, was banned, for flaming. he forced his way back into this forum by implied threats to Anu Garg, the founder of AWAD. this same person has also been know, for certain, to post under the names AphonicRants and KeivaCarpal.
Keiva, go away. You are not welcome here.
My thanks to all those who have made comments about Boole and Boolean logic/searches etc - it's been really interesting! It's fascinating to see how something like algebraic logic has been transformed into standard library and computer practice - to the extent that I, and I'm sure many others, didn't know where it started and with whom. I wonder if there are ways of searching which will be developed? ...Of course there will be; but being no Verne, I have no idea what they'll look like...
Alexis, all computer programs employ Boolean logic. All search engines, by definition, must use it. As soon as you enter your search terms, the search engine must use a statement like "Return the page's URL if the metadata on the HTML page contains these terms".
I'm not sure. It seems straight-forward enough when you say it, but I keep thinking about fuzzy logic programs. I'm no expert, though, and I've only written two of the little buggers. Just to see what it's all about, but I'm still confused about the fuss. One of my best friends' thesis advisor was Lofti Zadeh (the guy who formulated fuzzy logic). He used to talk about it all the time, but I had trouble following the point. Zadeh subbed in one of my other classes once, and it would've been nice to get word straight from the horse's mouth, but but it was a different subject and he didn't mention FL.
I would *like* to disgree with you (not to be disagreeable, but because it strikes me that you might be wrong), but the only examples I have of FL actually implement the code in binary logic - I mean, they have to, since the opcodes are based on binary logic. So I guess I answered my own point - at some level they all have to use binary logic - which makes you right after all.
I note (and maybe this is obvious to everyone) that there are several binary "logics." There is propositional calculus (probably what most people mean by it). There is also predicate calculus (or First Order Logic, FOL) which is a superset of propositional calculus and which is what programming languages like Prolog are based on (as well as many AI related programs). There are also extensions of FOL to temporal logics (these are used with path planning algorithms).
BTW, there was an article in last month's WIRED about search engines that was pretty interesting and not too technical.
Oh, and while it's true that digital computers have to use binary logic, it's not necessarily true that all computers will always use it. There are neural chips for pattern recognition without logic. If quantum computers take off, there may be yet another kind of logic that is used to program them (I don't know whether it will be mutually exclusive to FOL, but it the programs do look funny - maybe it's an extension of FOL?).
k
My encyclopedia says Boole was professor of math at University in Cork, Ireland.
Kenny babes. What are doing in a thread about math? You couldn't possibly be an authority on such an intelligent subject as this! So what are doing here? Oh, of course! The attention-seeking sad man thinks we need an encyclopedic excerpt to discuss this thread and he thinks he's doing us a favor by providing it! Get a grip, you pathetic insignificant wannabe librarian. Everyone is quite able to look up their own references without you. You are such a schmuck!
This may be a foolish leap
But of course it is. You're talking about yourself you fool!
This also applies to of-troy's post below.
And still you come back for more, Kenny boy. I hope you do. You are so much fun!
math? You couldn't possibly be an authority on such an intelligent subject
Actually, sir, the book I cite was awarded to me in 1968, by the national society of actuaries (Mu Alpha Theta), for high placement©ö on their annual mathematics contest for high school students.
©öSecond in the State of Illinois. For your comparative reference, Illinois' current population is slightly over one-quarter that of England.
Keiva: You are not welcome here.
It has been the contention of many secularists and theologians alike that religious fanatics are of a binary mindset. They can't think in any terms except Us vs. Them (If you're not with me, you're against me). While Boolean thinking is vital to current computers, new quantum computers utilizing more than two states (3 or more) are in the process of being conceived. Once a few technical glitches are out of the way, you can have 0, 1, 1/2 as choices, increasing the power manyfold. I have hope that the common acceptance of such a logic system will have great impact on the average person. That is, the normal person will learn that yes/no, us/them dichotomies is not the norm or even a valid way of thinking. This may improve our chances for understanding each other.
Cheers,
Bryan
You are only wretched and unworthy if you choose to be.
Oh, of course there are many kinds of logic. However, whatever may become available in the future, right now search engines - the ones Alexis asked about - must and do use binary or Boolean logic. If any of them used fuzzy logic - which at some level or another does devolve to a binary approach in any case - I'm absolutely certain the site concerned would scream it from the rooftops as a way to get even more completely unrequired pages when you submit a search term.
going way back up the thread (cos I was away for a couple of days!) - hey Fiberbabe and of troy - I'm a knitter too!
I knew there were only two stiches (but what a lot you can do with those two stitches!), but I hadn't thought of them in these terms....Excellent!
Didja know knitting was purportedly "invented" by men? - sailors, I believe 'twas, making the leap from mending nets and using ropes an' stuff. I think. Or is this an urban legend too? (or, more appropriately, a high-seas legend. Damn. What's an adjective meaning "high seas"?)
Let us go in peace to love and serve the board.
Dear MG: Have you ever taken a close look at the pictures of the Venus of Willendorf? A lady very successful in women's fashions got interested in archaeology, and noticed something that many hundred
men had overlooked. They talked about the Venus having a fancy hairdo, but when the lady looked at it, she discovered that it was not an elaborate hairdo, but a cap. Looking at the cap after reading this, I suspect very strongly that it was of small knitted squared joined together. Take a look and see what you
think. I'll have to go looking for URL.
PS here is URL
http://www.aeiou.at/aeiou.encyclop.data.image.v/v136200a.jpgPPS This picture does not look so much like little squares as the one I remember, but does look like
knitting. What do you think? Incidentally the lady who noticed the cap, also detected that the original
had been covered by some sort of garment, which the men had not seen.
Hmmm, Unca Bill. You could be right....Or it might be crochet? anyone know which art is older?
Are we SURE those ain't stylized curls? cos they sure seem to be stylized breasts....!
Let us go in peace to love and serve the board.
The other thing about the Venus is that I doubt very much that it had anything
to do with fertility magic. I think she was a beloved and respected grandmother
to half the tribe, a matriarch revered because of her experience and wisdom.
She proves the existence of clothing as much as thirty thousand years ago.
uh oh, you'll be sorry! i love knitting.. there is a book, no idle hands, a history of knitting in americaon my shelf of course, ..but knitting is way older. knitted socks have been found in egyptions tombs. and there are indications is was old even then!
partly because of the level of sophistication..the heels were double knit, to make them stronger! many knitters never learn to double knit!.. and as Dr bill has pointed out, there are indications on very early carving so of knitted type garment/designs.
an knitter worth her pins (or needles!) knows, christ went to his death in a knitted robe.. the soldier cast lots for his robe, because it couldn't be rent.. you can tear apart a garment made from cloth, and have small peices for mending or patching.. but if you try to pull apart a knitted robe, it is ruined..
in the days before powerlooms, it was faster to knit a garment than to weave and so.. a crafter (a person with a skilled that was recognized, but not guilded) was known by his smock (a smocked gathered jacket made of cloth) but poor folk wore knitware.. it stretches, so its easy to size and fit, unlike sewn garments that had to be fitted.
irish fisherman sweaters (and greek ones too) were knit in distinctive patterns to help identify drowned fishermen, when there bodies were recovered.. (the face is often nibbled one, or worse but the wool is un appatizing to most fish i guess.)
if you want to continue this, we can move to "word from German" (when ever some one went way off words, the answer was move it to words from German-- it all the way at the bottom and it didn't bother most folks.. so if you want, copy and paste to a new thread down there!)
So, of troy, did you take a look at the piccie Bill provided? what do you think? knitted? crocheted? (though you say knitting is the older art by far) or simply stylized, very curly, hair?
or anyone else have a take on this?
(not sure I do want to move it into "words from German"! - but perhaps we could have a separate knitting thread?)
Let us go in peace to love and serve the board.
we knew memory addresses - sometimes in hex, sometimes in octal, sometimes in binary
What's the plural of octopus?
hexadecipus (running-for-cover-e)
some of the rules for binary math and boolean logic, are similar to knittingA couple of thoughts from the dim and distant past when I was doing my degree. Margaret Boden (who has written several books about Artificial Intelligence) was one of my lecturers and is also into knitting. She was keen to draw an analogy between computer programs and knitting patterns; I believe I've heard others adopt the analogy (including yourself of course, Helen
). However Boden is also keen to emphasise that following a pattern, however complex, doesn't denote intelligence. This is quite an important distinction in AI/Philosophy.
(
of course there are many good reasons why we would prefer hand-made to mass-produced clothes!)
As to how well boolean logic applies to life, well, Douglas Hofstadter's (sp?) book
Godel, Escher Bach comes out with the nice suggestion that there are actually 3 answers to any question:
Yes, No or
MuMu unasks the question, a bit like the "answers" that Zen masters once provided to their students' misguided questions.
Interesting how we humans love to categorize to the nth degree. We all know (or should) that there isn't always a yes/no/mu answer. There is often (very, very often) a spectrum of colors between white and black. "Red" is not a "mu" answer to asking "what color is blood" or "what color is that fire truck?"
Cheers,
Bryan
You are only wretched and unworthy if you choose to be.
there isn't always a yes/no/mu answerQuite right, Bryan, in terms of all questions. But what I meant to imply (sort of paraphrasing Hofstadter) was that you can answer "yes/no/mu" to any question meant to elicit a "yes/no" answer
"Were you at X's house on the night of the 5th November?"
"The 5th November this year, you mean?"
"Why, were you doing something on 5th November
last year?"
"Does that have any bearing on the case?"
It's pretty easy to show that "yes" and "no" are about the least likely answers to any question, actually
Fisk
that's great to hear, Fishona! i noticed it years and years ago, and when ever i mention it.... it fell on deaf ears. the set (assembly language programers) and the set (knitter) have a very small subset (assembly language programers who also are knitters)
in knitting you can also create a stitch and drop or end a stitch--(put a bit in the bit bucket, as we used to say!)
and cables in knitting are like multiplying in binary.. and when you format a disk (yes, i know, nowdays they are all preformated) you put an A/C signal out.. alternating Highs (1) and lows (0), in knitting, you often start with ribbing, (columns of knits (1) and purls(0) or with garter stitch, (rows or knits and purls).
I seem to remember that punch cards were modeled after the pattern cards used for jacquard looms in weaving fabric... a quick google should help me substantiate that... there it is!
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blhollerith.htmAll better.
yes, but curiously, punch cards do not use any system that we use today... they were created to move data at a time of analog computers.. as i recall, punch card technology was on the way out as i was joining the world of computers.. all i remember was they were not digital, and did not use binary/octal/hex notations... but something else again...
its almost two different technologies (punch card from textiles, and binary from knitting) are used in different ways in a third technical craft, computers! connections with connections and connections!
and yes, a program (either a computer program or a pattern for knitting) is just a set of dirctions. Neither is inteligent!
I can remember when many companies put employees' pay status on punch cards. There
was a joke about the guy who stepped on his card with golf shoes, and to his surprise
got a better office, a secretary, and a pay increase.
yes, but curiously, punch cards do not use any system that we use today... they were created to move data at a time of analog computers.. as i recall, punch card technology was on the way out as i was joining the world of computers.. all i remember was they were not digital, and did not use binary/octal/hex notations... but something else again...
its almost two different technologies (punch card from textiles, and binary from knitting) are used in different ways in a third technical craft, computers! connections with connections and connections!
and yes, a program (either a computer program or a pattern for knitting) is just a set of dirctions. Neither is inteligent!
I used punch cards a lot in the early 80s (and paper tape as well mid 70s). The punch cards are binary (digital). The hole is open or closed. At one time punched cards or tape were used by nearly every digital computer.
OTOH, I doubt the hollerith codes on the cards were ASCII. I imagine it's related to IBM's other code - EBCDIC, that or Baudot codes.
There's some interesting stuff at
http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html.
According to
http://www.totse.com/en/technology/telecommunications/x25tut.htmlthe code is still in use, but they aren't specific. Hard to believe, I know, but people (in which group I include myself) are slow to change systems that work (no matter how poorly).
I saw several people working on programs drop their cards - and a number of them reduced to public sobbing. I don't miss those days at all.
k
I saw several people working on programs drop their cards - and a number of them reduced to public sobbing
I can well imagine!
These days, of course, there's no chance at all of buggering up programs through a single false step or accident. [po-faced]
A story that circulated in the latter days of World War Two ... about 1944-45.
First it is necessary to understand that anyone with a German or German-sounding last name was often the focus of suspicion.
The story goes :
One day a nosy neighbor picked up a piece of paper dropped by a neighbor of German descent. Seeing it was a series of numbers and letters he turned it in to the FBI. After several days of unsuccessfully trying to break the code and watching the woman the FBI brought her in for questioning.
She was told " We know you are a spy. We have a code you dropped and that was turned in to us. We want you to translate this for us."
They handed her a note that read k1P2,k3,change,knit three , (etc)
She promptly responded laughing : "Oh, that's where it went. It's the instructions for a cable stitch sweater I am knitting for my daughter."
k1P2,k3,change
I'll bet things like that still happen plenty, wow. One person's clear handwriting or notes to self is another person's cryptic unbreakable code.
But I often can't read
my own notes to self, come to think of it.
These days, of course, there's no chance at all of buggering up programs through a single false step or accident. [po-faced]
Yeah, right ...