tweak advanced

[lambda.git] / miscellaneous_lambda_challenges_and_advanced_topics.mdwn

1.      How would you define an operation to reverse a list? (Don't peek at the
[[lambda_library]]! Try to figure it out on your own.) Choose whichever
implementation of list you like. Even then, there are various strategies you
can use.


2.      An advantage of the v3 lists and v3 (aka "Church") numerals is that they
        have a recursive capacity built into their skeleton. So for many natural
        operations on them, you won't need to use a fixed point combinator. Why is
        that an advantage? Well, if you use a fixed point combinator, then the terms
        you get
        won't be strongly normalizing: whether their reduction stops at a normal form
        will depend on what evaluation order you use. Our online [[lambda evaluator]]
        uses normal-order reduction, so it finds a normal form if there's one to be
        had. But if you want to build lambda terms in, say, Scheme, and you wanted to
        roll your own recursion as we've been doing, rather than relying on Scheme's
        native `let rec` or `define`, then you can't use the fixed-point combinators
        `Y` or <code>&Theta;</code>. Expressions using them will have non-terminating
        reductions, with Scheme's eager/call-by-value strategy. There are other
        fixed-point combinators you can use with Scheme (in the [[week 3]] notes they
        were <code>Y&prime;</code> and <code>&Theta;&prime;</code>. But even with
        those evaluation order still matters: for some (admittedly unusual)
        evaluation strategies, expressions using them will also be non-terminating.

        The fixed-point combinators may be the conceptual heros. They are cool and
        mathematically elegant. But for efficiency and implementation elegance, it's
        best to know how to do as much as you can without them. (Also, that knowledge
        could carry over to settings where the fixed point combinators are in
        principle unavailable.)

        This is why the v3 lists and numbers are so lovely. However, one disadvantage
        to them is that it's relatively inefficient to extract a list's tail, or get a
        number's predecessor. To get the tail of the list [a;b;c;d;e], one will
        basically be performing some operation that builds up the tail afresh: at
        different stages, one will have built up [e], then [d;e], then [c;d;e], and
        finally [b;c;d;e]. With short lists, this is no problem, but with longer lists
        it takes longer and longer. And it may waste more of your computer's memory
        than you'd like. Similarly for obtaining a number's predecessor.

        The v1 lists and numbers on the other hand, had the tail and the predecessor
        right there as an element, easy for the taking. The problem was just that the
        v1 lists and numbers didn't have recursive capacity built into them, in the
        way the v3 implementations do.

        A clever approach would marry these two strategies.

        Version 3 makes the list [a; b; c; d; e] look like this:

                \f z. f a (f b (f c (f d (f e z))))

        or in other words:

                \f z. f a <the result of folding f and z over the tail>

        Instead we could make it look like this:

                \f z. f a <the tail itself> <the result of folding f and z over the tail>

        That is, now f is a function expecting *three* arguments: the head of the
        current list, the tail of the current list, and the result of continuing to
        fold f over the tail, with a given base value z.

        Call this a **version 4** list. The empty list could be the same:

                empty === \f z. z

        The list constructor would be:

                make_list === \h t. \f z. f h t (t f z)

        It differs from the version 3 `make_list` only in adding the extra argument
        `t` to the new, outer application of `f`.

        Similarly, 5 as a v3 or Church numeral looks like this:

                \s z. s (s (s (s (s z))))

        or in other words:

                \s z. s <the result of applying s to z (pred 5)-many times>

        Instead we could make it look like this:

                \s z. s <pred 5> <the result of applying s to z (pred 5)-many times>

        That is, now s is a function expecting *two* arguments: the predecessor of the
        current number, and the result of continuing to apply s to the base value z
        predecessor-many times.

        Jim had the pleasure of "inventing" these implementations himself. However,
        unsurprisingly, he wasn't the first to do so. See for example [Oleg's report
        on P-numerals](http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/lambda-calc.html#p-numerals).



3.      **Sets**

        You're now already in a position to implement sets: that is, collections with
        no intrinsic order where elements can occur at most once. Like lists, we'll
        understand the basic set structures to be *type-homogenous*. So you might have
        a set of integers, or you might have a set of pairs of integers, but you
        wouldn't have a set that mixed both types of elements. Something *like* the
        last option is also achievable, but it's more difficult, and we won't pursue it
        now. In fact, we won't talk about sets of pairs, either. We'll just talk about
        sets of integers. The same techniques we discuss here could also be applied to
        sets of pairs of integers, or sets of triples of booleans, or sets of pairs
        whose first elements are booleans, and whose second elements are triples of
        integers. And so on.

        (You're also now in a position to implement *multi*sets: that is, collections
        with no intrinsic order where elements can occur multiple times: the multiset
        {a,a} is distinct from the multiset {a}. But we'll leave these as an exercise.)

        The easiest way to implement sets of integers would just be to use lists. When
        you "add" a member to a set, you'd get back a list that was either identical to
        the original list, if the added member already was present in it, or consisted
        of a new list with the added member prepended to the old list. That is:

                let empty_set = empty  in
                ; see the library for definition of any
                let make_set = \new_member old_set. any (eq new_member) old_set
                                                        ; if any element in old_set was eq new_member
                                                        old_set
                                                        ; else
                                                        make_list new_member old_set

        Think about how you'd implement operations like `set_union`,
        `set_intersection`, and `set_difference` with this implementation of sets.

        The implementation just described works, and it's the simplest to code.
        However, it's pretty inefficient. If you had a 100-member set, and you wanted
        to create a set which had all those 100-members and some possibly new element
        `e`, you might need to check all 100 members to see if they're equal to `e`
        before concluding they're not, and returning the new list. And comparing for
        numeric equality is a moderately expensive operation, in the first place.

        (You might say, well, what's the harm in just prepending `e` to the list even
        if it already occurs later in the list. The answer is, if you don't keep track
        of things like this, it will likely mess up your implementations of
        `set_difference` and so on. You'll have to do the book-keeping for duplicates
        at some point in your code. It goes much more smoothly if you plan this from
        the very beginning.)

        How might we make the implementation more efficient? Well, the *semantics* of
        sets says that they have no intrinsic order. That means, there's no difference
        between the set {a,b} and the set {b,a}; whereas there is a difference between
        the *list* [a;b] and the list [b;a]. But this semantic point can be respected
        even if we *implement* sets with something ordered, like list---as we're
        already doing. And we might *exploit* the intrinsic order of lists to make our
        implementation of sets more efficient.

        What we could do is arrange it so that a list that implements a set always
        keeps in elements in some specified order. To do this, there'd have *to be*
        some way to order its elements. Since we're talking now about sets of numbers,
        that's easy. (If we were talking about sets of pairs of numbers, we'd use
        "lexicographic" ordering, where `(a,b) < (c,d)` iff `a < c or (a == c and b <
        d)`.)

        So, if we were searching the list that implements some set to see if the number
        5 belonged to it, once we get to elements in the list that are larger than 5,
        we can stop. If we haven't found 5 already, we know it's not in the rest of the
        list either.

        This is an improvement, but it's still a "linear" search through the list.
        There are even more efficient methods, which employ "binary" searching. They'd
        represent the set in such a way that you could quickly determine whether some
        element fell in one half, call it the left half, of the structure that
        implements the set, if it belonged to the set at all. Or that it fell in the
        right half, it it belonged to the set at all. And then the same sort of
        determination could be made for whichever half you were directed to. And then
        for whichever quarter you were directed to next. And so on. Until you either
        found the element or exhausted the structure and could then conclude that the
        element in question was not part of the set. These sorts of structures are done
        using **binary trees** (see below).


4.      **Aborting a search through a list**

        We said that the sorted-list implementation of a set was more efficient than
        the unsorted-list implementation, because as you were searching through the
        list, you could come to a point where you knew the element wasn't going to be
        found. So you wouldn't have to continue the search.

        If your implementation of lists was, say v1 lists plus the Y-combinator, then
        this is exactly right. When you get to a point where you know the answer, you
        can just deliver that answer, and not branch into any further recursion. If
        you've got the right evaluation strategy in place, everything will work out
        fine.

        But what if you're using v3 lists? What options would you have then for
        aborting a search?

        Well, suppose we're searching through the list [5; 4; 3; 2; 1] to see if it
        contains the number 3. The expression which represents this search would have
        something like the following form:

                ..................<eq? 1 3>  ~~>
                .................. false     ~~>
                .............<eq? 2 3>       ~~>
                ............. false          ~~>
                .........<eq? 3 3>           ~~>
                ......... true               ~~>
                ?

        Of course, whether those reductions actually followed in that order would
        depend on what reduction strategy was in place. But the result of folding the
        search function over the part of the list whose head is 3 and whose tail is [2;
        1] will *semantically* depend on the result of applying that function to the
        more rightmost pieces of the list, too, regardless of what order the reduction
        is computed by. Conceptually, it will be easiest if we think of the reduction
        happening in the order displayed above.

        Well, once we've found a match between our sought number 3 and some member of
        the list, we'd like to avoid any further unnecessary computations and just
        deliver the answer `true` as "quickly" or directly as possible to the larger
        computation in which the search was embedded.

        With a Y-combinator based search, as we said, we could do this by just not
        following a recursion branch.

        But with the v3 lists, the fold is "pre-programmed" to continue over the whole
        list. There is no way for us to bail out of applying the search function to the
        parts of the list that have head 4 and head 5, too.

        We *can* avoid some unneccessary computation. The search function can detect
        that the result we've accumulated so far during the fold is now true, so we
        don't need to bother comparing 4 or 5 to 3 for equality. That will simplify the
        computation to some degree, since as we said, numerical comparison in the
        system we're working in is moderately expensive.

        However, we're still going to have to traverse the remainder of the list. That
        `true` result will have to be passed along all the way to the leftmost head of
        the list. Only then can we deliver it to the larger computation in which the
        search was embedded.

        It would be better if there were some way to "abort" the list traversal. If,
        having found the element we're looking for (or having determined that the
        element isn't going to be found), we could just immediately stop traversing the
        list with our answer. Continuations will turn out to let us do that.

        We won't try yet to fully exploit the terrible power of continuations. But
        there's a way that we can gain their benefits here locally, without yet having
        a fully general machinery or understanding of what's going on.

        The key is to recall how our implementations of booleans and pairs worked.
        Remember that with pairs, we supply the pair "handler" to the pair as *an
        argument*, rather than the other way around:

                pair (\x y. add x y)

        or:

                pair (\x y. x)

        to get the first element of the pair. Of course you can lift that if you want:

                extract_1st === \pair. pair (\x y. x)

        but at a lower level, the pair is still accepting its handler as an argument,
        rather than the handler taking the pair as an argument. (The handler gets *the
        pair's elements*, not the pair itself, as arguments.)

        The v2 implementation of lists followed a similar strategy:

                v2list (\h t. do_something_with_h_and_t) result_if_empty

        If the v2list here is not empty, then this will reduce to the result of
        supplying the list's head and tail to the handler `(\h t.
        do_something_with_h_and_t)`.

        Now, what we've been imagining ourselves doing with the search through the v3
        list is something like this:


                larger_computation (search_through_the_list_for_3) other_arguments

        That is, the result of our search is supplied as an argument (perhaps together
        with other arguments) to the "larger computation". Without knowing the
        evaluation order/reduction strategy, we can't say whether the search is
        evaluated before or after it's substituted into the larger computation. But
        semantically, the search is the argument and the larger computation is the
        function to which it's supplied.

        What if, instead, we did the same kind of thing we did with pairs and v2 lists? That is, what if we made the larger computation a "handler" that we passed as an argument to the search?

                the_search (\search_result. larger_computation search_result other_arguments)

        What's the advantage of that, you say. Other than to show off how cleverly you can lift.

        Well, think about it. Think about the difficulty we were having aborting the
        search. Does this switch-around offer us anything useful?

        It could.

        What if the way we implemented the search procedure looked something like this?

        At a given stage in the search, we wouldn't just apply some function f to the
        head at this stage and the result accumulated so far, from folding the same
        function (and a base value) to the tail at this stage. And then pass the result
        of doing so leftward along the rest of the list.

        We'd also give that function a "handler" that expected the result of the
        current stage as an argument, and evaluated to passing that result leftwards
        along the rest of the list.

        Why would we do that, you say? Just more flamboyant lifting?

        Well, no, there's a real point here. If we give the function a "handler" that
        encodes the normal continuation of the fold leftwards through the list. We can
        give it another "handler" as well. We can also give it the underlined handler:


                the_search (\search_result. larger_computation search_result other_arguments)
                                   ------------------------------------------------------------------

        This "handler" encodes the search's having finished, and delivering a final
        answer to whatever else you wanted your program to do with the result of the
        search. If you like, at any stage in the search you might just give an argument
        to this handler, instead of giving an argument to the handler that continues
        the list traversal leftwards. Semantically, this would amount to *aborting* the
        list traversal! (As we've said before, whether the rest of the list traversal
        really gets evaluated will depend on what evaluation order is in place. But
        semantically we'll have avoided it. Our larger computation  won't depend on the
        rest of the list traversal having been computed.)

        Do you have the basic idea? Think about how you'd implement it. A good
        understanding of the v2 lists will give you a helpful model.

        In broad outline, a single stage of the search would look like before, except
        now f would receive two extra, "handler" arguments.

                f 3 <result of folding f and z over [2; 1]> <handler to continue folding leftwards> <handler to abort the traversal>

        f's job would be to check whether 3 matches the element we're searching for
        (here also 3), and if it does, just evaluate to the result of passing `true` to
        the abort handler. If it doesn't, then evaluate to the result of passing
        `false` to the continue-leftwards handler.

        In this case, f wouldn't need to consult the result of folding f and z over [2;
        1], since if we had found the element 3 in more rightward positions of the
        list, we'd have called the abort handler and this application of f to 3 etc
        would never be needed. However, in other applications the result of folding f
        and z over the more rightward parts of the list would be needed. Consider if
        you were trying to multiply all the elements of the list, and were going to
        abort (with the result 0) if you came across any element in the list that was
        zero. If you didn't abort, you'd need to know what the more rightward elements
        of the list multiplied to, because that would affect the answer you passed
        along to the continue-leftwards handler.

        A **version 5** list would encode this kind of fold operation over the list, in
        the same way that v3 (and v4) lists encoded the simpler fold operation.
        Roughly, the list [5; 4; 3; 2; 1] would look like this:


                \f z continue_leftwards_handler abort_handler.
                        <fold f and z over [4; 3; 2; 1]>
                        (\result_of_fold_over_4321. f 5 result_of_fold_over_4321  continue_leftwards_handler abort_handler)
                        abort_handler


                \f z continue_leftwards_handler abort_handler.
                        (\continue_leftwards_handler abort_handler.
                                <fold f and z over [3; 2; 1]>
                                (\result_of_fold_over_321. f 4 result_of_fold_over_321 continue_leftwards_handler abort_handler)
                                abort_handler
                        )
                        (\result_of_fold_over_4321. f 5 result_of_fold_over_4321  continue_leftwards_handler abort_handler)
                        abort_handler

                and so on               
                
        Remarks: the `larger_computation_handler` should be supplied as both the
        `continue_leftwards_handler` and the `abort_handler` for the leftmost
        application, where the head 5 is supplied to f. Because the result of this
        application should be passed to the larger computation, whether it's a "fall
        off the left end of the list" result or it's a "I'm finished, possibly early"
        result. The `larger_computation_handler` also then gets passed to the next
        rightmost stage, where the head 4 is supplied to f, as the `abort_handler` to
        use if that stage decides it has an early answer.

        Finally, notice that we don't have the result of applying f to 4 etc given as
        an argument to the application of f to 5 etc. Instead, we pass

                (\result_of_fold_over_4321. f 5 result_of_fold_over_4321 one_handler another_handler)

        *to* the application of f to 4 as its "continue" handler. The application of f
        to 4 can decide whether this handler, or the other, "abort" handler, should be
        given an argument and constitute its result.


        I'll say once again: we're using temporally-loaded vocabulary throughout this,
        but really all we're in a position to mean by that are claims about the result
        of the complex expression semantically depending only on this, not on that. A
        demon evaluator who custom-picked the evaluation order to make things maximally
        bad for you could ensure that all the semantically unnecessary computations got
        evaluated anyway. At this stage, we don't have any way to prevent that. Later,
        we'll see ways to semantically guarantee one evaluation order rather than
        another. Though even then the demonic evaluation-order-chooser could make it
        take unnecessarily long to compute the semantically guaranteed result. Of
        course, in any real computing environment you'll know you're dealing with a
        fixed evaluation order and you'll be able to program efficiently around that.

        In detail, then, here's what our v5 lists will look like:

                let empty = \f z continue_handler abort_handler. continue_handler z  in
                let make_list = \h t. \f z continue_handler abort_handler.
                        t f z (\sofar. f h sofar continue_handler abort_handler) abort_handler  in
                let isempty = \lst larger_computation. lst
                                ; here's our f
                                (\hd sofar continue_handler abort_handler. abort_handler false)
                                ; here's our z
                                true
                                ; here's the continue_handler for the leftmost application of f
                                larger_computation
                                ; here's the abort_handler
                                larger_computation  in
                let extract_head = \lst larger_computation. lst
                                ; here's our f
                                (\hd sofar continue_handler abort_handler. continue_handler hd)
                                ; here's our z
                                junk
                                ; here's the continue_handler for the leftmost application of f
                                larger_computation
                                ; here's the abort_handler
                                larger_computation  in
                let extract_tail = ; left as exercise
                        ;; for real efficiency, it'd be nice to fuse the apparatus developed
                        ;; in these v5 lists with the ideas from the v4 lists, above
                        ;; but that also is left as an exercise

        These functions are used like this:

                let my_list = make_list a (make_list b (make_list c empty) in
                extract_head my_list larger_computation

        If you just want to see `my_list`'s head, the use `I` as the
        `larger_computation`.

        What we've done here does take some work to follow. But it should be within
        your reach. And once you have followed it, you'll be well on your way to
        appreciating the full terrible power of continuations.

<!-- (Silly [cultural reference](http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/33440).) -->

        Of course, like everything elegant and exciting in this seminar, [Oleg
        discusses it in much more
        detail](http://okmij.org/ftp/Streams.html#enumerator-stream).



5.      Implementing (self-balancing) trees

        more...