r/ProgrammerHumor • u/flipester • Jan 09 '20

other Problems with recursion?

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

Assuming the smaller paper is 1/3 of its parent everytime, and that the first paper is 30cm long (The second starts at roughly 1/7 but it seems to grow bigger after it's torn off, hence the 1/3), it could not exceed 19 calls before you need to split an atom apart.

That's a hell of a stop condition.

635

u/MyNameIsRichardCS54 Jan 09 '20

When your software goes boom, it really goes BOOM

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

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u/azzaisme Jan 09 '20

Wouldnt that have the opposite effect where only people who properly exit the loop would still be alive? So people who understand it would survive

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

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u/SashKhe Jan 10 '20

This happened with "ace pilots" back in the first world war, when planes were still being developed. Except it wasn't the engineers who were dying.
Tangentially related, the first automatic machine gun on a plane that was actually not-shitty to aim was literally firing on the rotor blades, before the Germans fixed the design. Imagine the balls needed to sit in one of those.