On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 2:35 PM, benjayk <benjamin.jaku...@googlemail.com>wrote:
OK, take the sentence: > > 'Not all sentences have unambigous truth values - by the way you won't be > able to determine that this sentence doesn't have a unambigous truth value > by using a computer ' > OK, if I changed "by using a computer" to " by asking Benjamin Jakubik" explain to me why at the fundamental logical level things would be different. > So transistor count and smartness are the same? Not a bad first order approximation. Software is improving too, maybe not at the breakneck pace of hardware evolution but still much faster than humans are improving their software. > So if I have 10^^^^100 transistors that compute while(true) then you have > something that is > unimaginable much smarter than a human? > In a word yes. And I must say that 10^^^^100 is a pretty big number considering that there are only 10^ 80 atoms in the observable universe. >> if you instructed a computer to find the first even integer greater >> than 4 that is not the sum of two primes greater than 2 and then stop what >> will the computer do? It would take you less than 5 minutes to write such a >> program so tell me, will it ever stop? > > > I don't know. I don't know either, nobody knows, even the computer doesn't know if it will stop until it finds itself stopping; if you want to know what it's going to do there is no shortcut, all you can do is watch it and see. > > This doesn't relate to whether it carries out the instructions > The computer will either stop or it will not and the difference depends on your instructions. You said "The definition of a computer is that it precisely carries out the instructions it is given" so is the implicit order to stop included in "find the first even integer greater than 4 that is not the sum of two primes greater than 2 and then stop"? Saying the computer only does what we tell it to do doesn't mean much in a case like this because it is far from clear what the implications of our orders will be. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
