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You don’t see how a self-replicating pattern in an abstract context can serve as a model of self-replicating patterns in practical contexts? Or why studying ho
by FakeComments 8y ago
You don’t see how a self-replicating pattern in an abstract context can serve as a model of self-replicating patterns in practical contexts?
Or why studying how different formalisms in language lead to different complexity in constructing such patterns may relate to things like bootstrapping DNA?
- gambler 8y agoI don't see discussions of any of the things you mentioned. I see people falling in love with "clever" code. Quines can be made straightforward. You have two copies of your code. Copy 2 then prints copy 1 twice, creating the replica of the original 2 copies. That's it. Everything else is trickery dealing with language boilerplate and string escapes. Similarly, I'm pretty sure the quine above is not generalizable to any language. It's all about Ruby syntax, not some fundamental property of the program.