Recursion anyone ?

An actor (who acts in a film about an actor)+
A story-teller (who tells the story of a story-teller)+
A thinker (who thinks about a thinker)+
A painter (who paints a painter)+
A peom (which is in praise of a poem)+
A code-generator (which generates a code-generator)+

More ?

This blog itself will have such a recursion. You know what :Rolling eyes: ?

BTW, why this thought on recursion ? – you might ask…

Was thinking about recursion in movies and the overhead of a system which understands recursion (in this case, the viewers).

Expressing recursion is very simple as we had seen. But for a system to take in recursion, will be a bit difficult.

Assume we are to watch a movie with such a recursion taken to inner levels. That is, a story based on “An actor (who acts in a film about an actor)+“. We will not be able to comprehend after a depth, as the amount of info (context) which is needed to go into a level and come back and follow the story in the outer level would easily overwhelm us.

But assume the recursion is replaced by a loop, wherein we see similar story one after another. This will not overwhelm our resources (as we will have to deal with only one context at a time) and we will be capable of prediciting a similar story (reusing the context) and get our system ready for it.

When some part of the outer-level context goes into the inner-level (or vice versa), it will be hard to convert a recursion into a loop.

If you have read till here and you understood whatever I wrote, welcome to the club !!!! :Very Happy:
And here is more for you…
Cross Recursion (Cyclic recursion with n = 1) : An actor (who acts as a writer who writes a story about an actor)+

(Originally posted on Mon May 23, 2005 8:20 pm, in my personal blogs in blogs.adventnet.com. Currently those blogs have been moved to archive and many links do not work already. So, making a copy here. )

Some interesting comments from the original post :

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Posted: Mon Dec 26, 2005 10:57 am

You should watch the movie “The Player”. You will like it.

posted by Tim Robbins
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Posted: Mon Dec 26, 2005 5:55 pm

Thanks ‘Tim Robbins”.
Had a peek of what The Player was about, in IMDB.

A related quote in the user comments…

Quote:

During the same scene Mill gives a little speech in which he avers that “movies are art,” a statement that amounts to sardonic irony since, as a greedy producer, he cares nothing at all about art, but only about box office success. His words also form a kind of dramatic irony when one realizes that this movie itself really is a work of art. As Altman observes in a trailing clip, the movie “becomes itself.” The Machiavellian ending illustrates this with an almost miraculous dovetailing. This is the kind of script that turns most screen writers Kermit-green with envy.

posted by rraj

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Posted: Tue Dec 27, 2005 8:38 am

To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion

posted by Captain Recursion

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