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lambda calculus and Hitchhiker's guide (1)

lambda calculus and Hitchhiker's guide

One day, I hit on to want to know about lambda calculus, and looked up Wikipedia. There are nice entry about that, but I could not understand some examples of calculation. It took a week to figure out. Maybe this is trivial, but I would like to brag myself about that. There is a common saying, ``they brag most who can do least.''

I am not familiar with lambda calculus. If I encounter something not familiar, I usually lookup some kind of guide book. I went to some city, I usually have a book called ``Chikyu no aruki kata (How to walk on the earth (in Japanese)),'' or Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy. This article could be a tiny version of a Hitchhiker's guide to lambda calculus.

According to the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy is the most successful book in the universe. However, it seems no one knows the book is written in which language. If that is the most successful book, it seems all the people living in the universe can read. Or, also according to the guide, there is no population in the universe, maybe no one read the book. But then what does the most successful mean...

The guide could have an artificial intelligence, and all the people might read the guide using a babel fish. (In case you do not know the guide, the babel fish is a translation fish between any kind of species in universe using some kind of telepathy. But the translation quality is sometimes not so good. There is a translation engine on the web after this fish.)

But the main character of the guide, Arthur, can read the guide before he implanted a babel fish, cannot he? Then, the guide should have some kind of a translator. There could be a tiny possibility that there is a earth language (Queen's English) version of the guide, but I am sceptical of that. Because the company that sells guide tried to sell one version of guide to all the parallel universe including the past and the future.

Even there is a translator included, there must be a ``native'' or ``internal'' language of the guide. I can not imagine what kind of language is used for the guide, but some part related logic or mathematics could be understandable. I am pretty sure some entries about mathematics or logic in the guide. It is interesting for me that what kind of logical expression in the guide. It seems it is infinite improbable, but, it may be lambda calculus.

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