On 09/02/2024 17:01, Malcolm McLean wrote:

On 09/02/2024 14:03, David Brown wrote:

On 09/02/2024 12:24, Malcolm McLean wrote:

And even when I agree there might be some truth in that, and explain
why, I am then accused of misrepresenting what an Oxford English
degree is like.

Again, read my posts.  I said your description of your degree does not
match my experience with my own degree at Oxford, nor what I heard
from others at the time who studied English literature.  You may have
given an accurate description of your personal experiences - I have no
way to either prove or disprove that, and no reason to suspect you of
being intentionally deceptive.  But I believe it to have been unusual,
and due to a bad tutor.

OK. So you also attended Oxford. And now I'm surprised.

Why is that surprising?

That's what
Oxford English is like. Very much an emphasis on geting things done,
quickly and to deadlines, because most Oxford English graduates will
work in careers where that is important. Only a small minority become computer programmers like me where a program often has t be perfect ot
it doesn't work at all. Now whislt of course I don;t have direct
experience of other colleges, I'm pretty sure my own college was fairly normal about this. One tutor was maybe a bit keener than normal.
 We got essays for next week on an author most of us had never read on
the very first day, and I dn;t think you;f]=d get that at every college.
But not far off.

Perhaps you should discourage your cat from walking across your keyboard
while trying to type. Surely accurate typing is a skill you need for programming?

I know literature students (of any language) were expected to work hard, reading a lot of texts - /all/ students at Oxford had intense workloads.
In computer science, practicals were done in whatever language the
lecturer liked - so you might easily find you have to learn a new
programming language in a couple of weeks, outside of any courses or
tutorials, for answering the practical.

I know literature students were expected to write a lot, quickly - as
were students of most subjects. But IME they were also expected to
write accurately and sensibly. There is no point in doing something
fast, if it is not correct (to the extent that a literature essay can be "correct").

I'm really not mischaracterising. Of course you also have to defend the
essay and it is marked. But that's less important. It's very unusual to receive a mark for an essay which is so low that it means that if you
write a similar essay in finals you will fail. Oxford is extremely
generous with the lower marks and in ensuring that they are not a fail.

I have seen students at Oxford fail. Not many, but a few.

Unless of course the candidate submits nothing. In which case it can
only be a fail. So you must submit something which constitutes an essay
for the tutorial, and my tutors were very insistent on that.

You sound like you were trying to get away the absolute minimum possible without failing.

I fell out with my tutor catastrophically over moral issues and because
of the type of subject English Literature is, that had profound
implications for my work. He allowed that to happen, he was in the wrong about our dispute  and everything I predicted that would happen in
English Studies has in fact come to pass, and he was therefore a bad
tutor. But to be fair I was an extremely difficult student.

Such bad chemistry between a student and a tutor happens sometimes, unfortunately.

But what you are describing is a situation where you scraped through,
learning little from the tutor. That is not normal university experience.

If you change the halting problem such that some of the symbols on
the tape are allowed to have unknown values then I don't think you
are changing it in any mathematically very interesting way so it is
still "trival", but if you attempt a halt decider it will
substantially change your programming approach, and so it is no
longer "unimportant".

I would prefer to think a bit about how a volatile input tape would
relate to the halting problem as it is normally stated, before
offering an opinion on how it may or may not change the result.  I
suspect you are correct that it will not change the problem or the
results, but I would want to be a bit more rigorous about what is
meant before jumping to conclusions.

Well this is it isn't it. Employ a computer scientist as a mathematician
and you'll get a rigorous proof. Employ an English graduate (and I have actually held the job title "mathematician" though I am in no way
qualified to describe myself as such) and he quickly guesses. But are
you so surprised that you think I am thereby misrepresenting Oxford
English? And the English graduate does at least produce something constructive quickly.

I think your situation at university was unusual, as you describe it -
though not impossible.

And I would expect someone who has a degree in English to be more
accurate in the language they write. Perhaps my expectations are
unreasonable, but in comparison to other regulars here, your rate of
typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and - more importantly - confusing and unclear wording, is significantly higher. We all make
mistakes at times, but to reach your level shows a lack of care and a
lack of attention to detail. It is not a matter of producing things
quickly - it is laziness.

Put it this way. If you were to apply to my department for a job as a programmer, and you wrote your CV and cover letter in the style you
write in this newsgroup, I would reject you on that basis alone.

However, I have no idea what you mean by "if you attempt a halt
decider it will substantially change your programming approach".

We're changing the model slightly so that instead of all the input tape
being available to the decider, some values are unknown. It still has to determine whether the program will halt or not, and whilst sometimes
this will now be inherently impossible because the answer depends on the input, often it will not be so. As I said, I don't think anything much
has actually changed. But it does mean that we now have to write our
halt decider in a different way. It's no longer as simple as replacing
the code we want to know is reached by exit() and declaring that it is
now the halting problem.

The halt decider will fail to work as specified on some inputs, so I say "attempt a halt decider". You can have a go. But it won't actually work.

So when you write "if you attempt a halt decider", you mean something
like attempting to "write" a halt decider, or "design", or "test", or
"run" a halt decider? And doing this will somehow "change your
programming approach" ? Are you trying to say that if you allow some
input values to be unknown, it changes how you design your halt decider?
That would make no sense, because you /can't/ design a general halt
decider (without transfinite computation models and "oracles"). Are you
trying to say that if someone spends time trying to do this, it will
change their attitude to programming in general?

Your first attempt at explaining this made no sense. Your second
attempt did not help at all. Perhaps it is best just to leave it alone.

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