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Re: Countchars



Yep, you've hit upon (or did you already know it?) one of the many
gimmicks for streamlining Gödel's original encoding. (I *think* the
variable base trick, which makes parsing a concatenation of encoded
symbols computationally easier, is due to Kripke.)
To make this slightly more pertinent to the wordsmithing concerns of
this list I offer the following: (sorry, it's an attachment but
smallish) 

Attachment: georgeb2.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document




David Auerbach
Department of Philosophy & Religion
Box 8103
NCSU
Raleigh, NC 27695-8103
On Feb 14, 2005, at 11:16 AM, cld@xxxxxxxx wrote:
You can compute length for a very long series, say n=123456789, using a very large base, say 1234567, without inventing 1234567 unique symbols (because, obviously, it doesn't matter what the symbols are, you're just counting them). Also, again obvious, you can always make length equal to n (the last number in the series) by increasing the base to (at least) n+1.