Somewhere I have a button...

[jducoeur]

... that says something like:

var x = 100;
do {
   x = x + 1;
} until (x == 0);

Substitute "death" for "x", and you've got a painfully concise summary of the Middle Eastern situation...

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting different results. :-)

[mentalgiant.livejournal.com]

One could argue the same about doing nothing and expecting different results.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Not for the traditional meaning of "results", eh?

[mentalgiant.livejournal.com]

What do you mean?

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

A result has a cause, a progenitor, an action which forced it to arise.

There is no "result" from doing nothing - anything which follows, occurs because of some other action or impluse. (I am ignoring entropy - although one might argue that it, too, is a force of some kind arising spontaneously. But that leads to a very long philosophical debate which would never detract from my point.)

[mentalgiant.livejournal.com]

All I am saying is that because man is fundamentally flawed, there will always be war.

[peregrinning.livejournal.com]

So, for the programming impaired, would it be:

"Keep killing people until no one has died"?

Not sure what the double equals sign means... but I agree, that's a good summation of the situation.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

It means "keep doing what you are doing, until the impossible happens".

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Start with 100.

Add one.

Keep adding one until you get 0.

The funny thing is that this will eventually quit on many computers, after you get to such an unbelievably large number that the computer can't handle it and wraps around to an equally unbelievable negative number. This says more about how weird computers are than about the algorithm. ;)

[jducoeur]

The funny thing is that this will eventually quit on many computers

Does so in real life, too. There just isn't anyone left to observe the readout...

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

Come, come! The Cray-3 is so fast it can execute an infinite loop in under 2 seconds!

(Actually, if x is an int, my machine at work exits after about 50 seconds...)

[talvinamarich.livejournal.com]

So.

We should run a stack trace on Diplomacy?