Episode notes
2 April 2026
The handout (a sample Refal program) can be found here:
(The talk is unlikely to be very easy to follow without it.)
But I’m afraid the line numbers you’ll see there don’t match the ones I mention in the talk: my original printed handout only numbered the non-blank lines (as is usual in line-numbered texts of poems, etc.), but not everyone follows that convention.
Keywords
computation
functional programming
pattern matching
term rewriting
Markov normal algorithms
Soviet dissidents
one-party state
Valentin Turchin
Bulat Okudzhava
Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics