CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@0xabad1dea

I can be as nitpicky as you like, and point out that the sigma also lacks information on the stopping conditions, and it is only by unspoken shared understanding that mathematicians agree on what the infinite summation is doing/what information they're getting out of it, and you can encode that unspoken shared understanding in the for-loop by coding up a stop condition when a convergence is detected.

But, again, not the point of Freya's original point, nor of my posting of it.

@jupiter https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shana/116528612214892516

@nyovaya @nyx Of course, that's neither the point of the infinite summation nor the point of the translation of the math notation into the for-loop.

The point is that there is a translation from the notation to a computer language format that allows a person not versed in maths to understand the underlying concept of the math notation in an intuitive way, as a starting point. If you can't understand what sigma does at its most basic, you cannot understand its actual math purpose as a whole.

@jupiter for (sum=0, k=0;;k++) sum+=pow(a*r,k)

Now if you had left the starting index out of the notation, that would have been a stumper

@tautology That might have been why my high school math teacher made me promise I would not go into maths in exchange for a passing grade.

I ended up in computers instead which totally has no maths whatsoever!

(in hindsight, not the best maths teacher)

@hjvt hey, why have one for-loop when you can have Parallel.ForEach() and turn *all* your cpu cores into one toasty personal heating unit!

@xerz If only someone had just put a couple of for-loops as footnotes in my school texts! It would have been such a time saver.

@nyx Super nitpickity, if you don't have a stop condition, a for-loop will happily go on until the death of the universe (or your pc, whichever comes first)

But in general, the sigma is the abstract definition, the for-loop is a possible concrete implementation of that definition, in a language that the target of this PSA (non mathy programmers) can understand and go "oooh ok I get it now". It would have saved me like half a semester if someone had shown me this up front, no other words needed.

@zmz oh yeah, "just" and "simply" should be banned from most sentences, I agree

@mousey ikr??

Regular reminder to self