James Tauber's Blog 2006/05/05
Unit-Testing the Brain
I recently bought The Reasoned Schemer by Daniel Friedman, et al, being a big fan of The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer (A Little Java, A Few Patterns didn't grab me in the same way).
The Reasoned Schemer teaches logical programming in a functional programming paradigm. Of course, it's written in the same question / answer style as the other books—the book asks you a question that you may or may not know the answer to and then gives you the answer. It then asks another question and gives the answer and so on. There's no other content than these question / answer pairs other than a handful of "laws" and "commandments".
The questions cover a range of cases to make sure you understand the subtleties and edge-cases. You have to mold your mind so that it gets the right answer to one question and then refine your thinking further if you can't then handle the question that follows. Eventually, the questions have handled enough cases that you really grok what's going on.
It occurs to me that this style is basically a set of Unit Tests for the Brain.
As a really simple example, here are the first three pairs from chapter 7 which define what a 'bit' is in the context of the rest of the chapter:
- Is 0 a bit?
- Yes.
- Is 1 a bit?
- Yes.
- Is 2 a bit?
- No. A bit is either a 0 or a 1.
That's just a unit test for your brain's concept of what a bit is. It's Test-Driven (Brain) Development.
by jtauber : Created on May 6, 2006 : Last modified May 6, 2006 : Categories books : 5 comments (permalink)
Teaching New Testament Greek
I'm teaching New Testament Greek to a small group and tonight was our first lesson. I just talked about the history of the Greek language and outlined the (I think) novel approach I'm taking to this course.
Basically, we'll be learning inductively but with a graded series of text fragments from John's Gospel generated algorithmically to prioritize learning the words and word forms that will, in turn, mostly quickly enable reading of more text fragments (similar to the problem posed in my programming competition).
We'll still be covering traditional grammar but it will come after the grammar points have been seen in real texts a few times. There'll be a focus on reading and learning inflected forms first (and always in the context of a clause) and only abstracting lemmas and paradigms after the fact. This far more closely resembles how first language acquisition works and should lead to much quicker intuitive understanding of the language.
This is essentially an alpha test but, as a couple of the guys are remote, I'm trying to do as much via email and Web as possible and so, if all goes well, I might offer this to a broader audience online at some stage.
I'll post updates as things progress.
by jtauber : Created on May 5, 2006 : Last modified May 5, 2006 : Categories read_john graded_reader : 4 comments (permalink)