Take your PIC

Don’t you just adore the delightful creatures? My first brief and rather chaste encounter with them happened (I am now willing to relate) in 1970, at the innocent age of twelve. Needless to say, at this age you don’t really understand what is going on. A mere frisson, perhaps: an amorphous and slightly illicit thrill somewhere around the loins. Like so many adolescents, I gained much of my early knowledge through old wives’ tales, passed to me in a confidential whisper by a friend. Apparently, or so he told me, a sure-fire way to make a computer explode is to ask it the question ‘If I told you that everything I say is a lie, would I be telling the truth?’

            This information was pretty oblique, but nevertheless charged with useful facts for someone with an enquiring mind who was willing to read between the lines. For one thing, I deduced that the purpose of computers is to answer questions, presented to them in perfectly ordinary English. For another, it was clear that recursion – a snake that eats its own conceptual tail – was deeply upsetting to them, and was liable to make them destroy themselves in a fit of frustration. How glad I was to be able to benefit from my friend’s greater experience of these things and save myself from embarrassing future faux pas.

Copyright © 2004 Cyberlife Research Ltd.
Last modified: 06/04/04