On Friday 05 September 2008, Mike Tintner wrote: > Were your computer like a human mind, it would have been able to say > (as you/we all do) - "well if that part of the problem is going to be > difficult, I'll ignore it" or.. "I'll just make up an answer..". or > "by God I'll keep trying other ways until I do solve this.." or... > "..zzzzzzzz" or ... Computers, currently, aren't free thinkers.
I'm pretty sure that compiler optimizers, that go in and look at your loops and other computational elements of a program, are able to make assessments like that. Of course, they'll just leave it as it is instead of completely ignoring parts of your program that you wish to compile, but it does seem similar. I recently came across an evolutionary optimizer for compilers to test parameters to gcc to try to figure the best way to compile a program on a certain architecture (to learn all of the gcc parameters yourself seems impossible sometimes, you see). Perhaps there's some evolved laziness in the human brain that could be modeled with gcc "easily enough". - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ Engineers: http://heybryan.org/exp.html irc.freenode.net #hplusroadmap ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=111637683-c8fa51 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com