The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer'sPerspective:: Redux

[Pragma]

BCS wrote:
> Reply to Pragma,
> 
>> There are moments where I wish I could think *like* Rain Man,
>> especially when it comes to concurrency.
>>
> [...]
>> If nothing else, it illustrates that there's something
>> extraordinary about such abilities that may be permanently
>> out-of-reach for normal people, despite the fact that some people are
>> just born that way.
>>
> 
> I have wondered if this is something like incomputableity with regards 
> to a Turing machine. Might the normal brain be like a Turing machine and 
> the autistic brain be something like a brain not limited in the same 
> way? Given that some people can, for instance, identify large primes in 
> near constant time, I'd say this is a distinct possibility.

I agree.  There's a whole range of "brain temperments" that give rise to all kinds of "ab-normal" behaviors like this. 
Autism is one.  Synesthesia is another.

I saw this one program about a savant (of the non-idiot variety) that was a "visual-numerical synesthete": he could read 
a number and would see it's "shape" in his mind's eye.  By focusing on various facets of the shape and color, he could 
determine all kinds of things without using math: odd/even, prime, factors, etc.  When asked to use clay to model these 
shapes, it was found to not be a hoax, and that his reckoning of these numbers was highly regular and uniform. 
Fascinating stuff.

So the real question becomes: If the real top-tier* insights are permanently out of reach for us "mere mortals", how do 
we teach a program to garner these kinds of insights (for parallelism and optimization) for us instead?

(*I think we can all agree that parallelism is not inherently difficult to grasp. But for sizable programs, where to 
split things up can be a very tough problem to sovle correctly.)

-- 
- EricAnderton at yahoo