IMHO everyone interested in computer science should try some Borges, at least Ficciones. Many of his stories are so mind-boggingly close to many topics of interest in CS. Beside The Library of Babel, I can come up with at least two other examples:
* Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius describes an extreme Idealistic philosophy where things exist only as long as someone (something?) perceives them, which IMHO is an apt description of the digital world.
* Funes describes the life of a man with perfect recall: so perfect, in fact, that he is unable to classify things (e.g., stones, or dogs) due to the infinite amount of details that set every single object apart from every other. And in a way, don't ML algorithms work by teaching a computer to forget about these details?
lou1306|4 years ago
* Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius describes an extreme Idealistic philosophy where things exist only as long as someone (something?) perceives them, which IMHO is an apt description of the digital world.
* Funes describes the life of a man with perfect recall: so perfect, in fact, that he is unable to classify things (e.g., stones, or dogs) due to the infinite amount of details that set every single object apart from every other. And in a way, don't ML algorithms work by teaching a computer to forget about these details?
lvncelot|4 years ago