2008-01-06

Tree of life

My favourite organisational concept (a tree, that is). After a sleepless night (the result of too much Xmas cake probably), I woke up with a desire to fire up the old Bloodshed Dev-C compiler on the laptop. One of my university lecturing specialities before I retired, was teaching algorithms & programming techniques. So, designed a nice recursive Win32 tree program (more entertaining than Sudoku), and spent some hours tinkering with it until I liked the details. Squished it with Gimp (open-source graphics software), annotated it with my original blog title and sub-title, and replaced the old blog pic with this new & perhaps rather apocalyptic version.


For those readers not familiar with recursion, it is a method of specifying an algorithm or procedure that invokes the algorithm itself within the body of the specification. An oft-quoted example is "...and God created man in his own image..." which could be criticised (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) as having various defects when matched against the humdrum requirements of computers; it has no stop condition, does not anywhere reduce to an element which can actually be created (or indeed change in any way at all), has no clearly specified engine to run the algorithm on...

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