23 Nov 2004
So, I'm the usual (crazy) professional programmer who finds reading about programming interesting to say the least. Today I ran across an interesting article about Using Bugs To Bring Developers and Testers Closer Together which lead me to this article Makers and Breakers. There was this great quote:
Suppose there is a village in which every man must be clean shaven. There is a male barber living in the village who shaves those men, and only those men, who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber? --Bertrand Russell</p>
What was so remarkable was the flawed (or what I saw was flawed) logic in the whole discussion on the articles page. Lets take a look one sentence at a time.
First off it says nothing about anyone else in the village. We can only know that there are men there. We don't know anything else about who else is there. That and they must be clean shaven. OK. Next sentence.
There is a barber who shaves men who do not shave themselves. So there are men in town who shave themselves. Therefore the last sentence (question).
It's obvious he shaves himself. Now, if you look at the discussion it was obvious that people were thinking a little too hard about this one. This logic (or complete over site by me) makes both of these articles lose key points the authors attempt to make. I just found it interesting the no one picked up on how easy the logic seemed. Feel free to comment on this as well as my grammar/spelling mistakes.
{"display_name"=>"chris", "login"=>"chris", "email"=>"crmacd@gmail.com", "url"=>"http://www.crmacd.com"}