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You are of course correct, somehow I tricked myself into believing this would require compressing the number for every image into its image. But on a second tho
by danbruc 12y ago
You are of course correct, somehow I tricked myself into believing this would require compressing the number for every image into its image. But on a second thought there might still be a tough problem - altering the number will alter the image which will in turn require altering the number again. So the (possibly) hard problem is finding a fixed point which may actually not even exist (for a given formula).
- colanderman 12y agoAh, but there is a science behind writing such things. They're called quines. Here's one I wrote: http://chris.pacejo.net/postscript/quine.ps http://chris.pacejo.net/postscript/quine.ps The trick is that the part of the number (program) that encodes the image of the number doesn't need to encode the image of itself -- that can merely be created directly from that part of the number. See e.g. the source of (or output of!) the quine I linked. The first half of the program is the "image"; the second half basically just prints the "image" once as it is represented in the source, and again after interpreting it a bit. (In fact this way you don't even need to compress the "image"... the compression comes from the fact that your "program" is roughly just two copies of the same thing.)