From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2005-11-19T04:28:03+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ PROPOSAL] autoreferential letter count

On Nov 18, 2005, at 11:15 AM, mental@rydia.net wrote:

> Quoting Paolo Capriotti <p.capriotti@gmail.com>:
>
>
>> I propose the following for the next week quiz:
>>
>> Write a ruby program that takes a sentence as its input an
>> produces an output that autoreferentially describes the letters
>> found in the sentence _and_ the description itself.
>>
>
> Interesting.  This is basically equivalent to writing a function
> which takes a message and produces a combined message + header,
> where the header includes a checksum/digest of the combined message
> + header.
>
> I don't believe that's possible in general, but it may be in
> specific cases, depending on the properties of the particular
> checksumming algorithm chosen.

Hmm, I'm not sure that makes a great quiz then, unless we supply a  
good number of test cases known to work.

James Edward Gray II