The cool thing about @cstross's The Laundry Files series is that it posits that magic is a branch of applied computation.
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The cool thing about @cstross's The Laundry Files series is that it posits that magic is a branch of applied computation.
And if you understand how Turing completeness works, that means it's possible to summon Cthulhu by playing Magic the Gathering, or carefully organizing a couple million migrating crabs.
I imagine The Laundry has a reoccurring problem of their techs treating it like the "Can it run Doom?" problem and doing Bad Ideas just to prove it's possible.
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@cstross "what happened to Steve? He was supposed to help me research this transformation matrix last week"
"oh, didn't you hear? He managed to summon The Time Worm on a TI-83 powered by a pile of moldy potatoes. Unfortunately it got summoned right into his head, so... He's out of commission, permanently."
"oh, damn it. He was helping me see if I could cast a fireball from a pregnancy test. The CPU has JUST enough RAM to run the arcane algorithms..." -
@foone was it the regular TI-83 or the TI-83 Silver Edition? just so I can uh... avoid The Time Worm...
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@nincodedo sorry, Turing Equivalence means it doesn't matter.
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@flyingsaceur @cstross definitely
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@foone I have literally just started reading this series and I'm loving it. I just wish there was a way to keep the Kindle app and my paperback copy in sync...