Quote

"Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever."
- Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

Saturday, 22 June 2013

Recursion

A while ago, (well, a loooong time ago), I was bored and so I looked up funny things you can do with Google. You know, like when you search Google Gravity and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky". Or if you search "do a barrel roll". One of my personal favourites is "askew". When I was searching through the various tricks, I came across that if you typed "recursion" into Google, it will say, "Did you mean: recursion ?" But it would be spelt the same way. At first (and up until now) I thought Google had just made a mistake.  But now that I'm studying for computer science, in which I learned about recursion methods, I finally understand what Google was doing.

re·cur·sion  

/riˈkərZHən/

Noun
  1. The repeated application of a recursive procedure or definition.
  2. A recursive definition.
 If that doesn't make sense, basically (at least in computer science), something that is recursive is something that calls itself. I would try and explain that using methods and other computer science stuff, but none of you are going to understand it, so I won't bother. Anyways, when Google says "Did you mean: recursion ?", the word is a link to the word being Google searched. So when you type in recursion and click on the link from "Did you mean: recursion ?", you get the same result: it called itself, therefore causing the Google search of recursion to be recursive itself.
Needless to say, I love Google.

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