On 4/17/2015 5:35 AM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
If you had an actual Turing machine and unlimited time, you could by brute force
emulate everything. However, that is not the point. If you car needs a part replaced,
you don't need to get a replacement exactly the same down to the quantum level. This is
the case every machine, and there is no reason to believe biological machines are
different: infinite precision parts would mean zero robustness.
I think you miss the point. If you want to emulate a car or a biological machine, then
some classical level of exactness would suffice. But the issue is the wider program that
wants to see the physical world in all its detail emerge from the digital computations
of the dovetailer. If that is your goal, then you need to emulate the finest details of
quantum mechanics. This latter is not possible on a Turing machine because of the
theorem forbidding the cloning of a quantum state. Quantum mechanics is, after all, part
of the physical world we observe.
But the goal is not to emulate an existing physical world, it's to instantiate a physical
world as a computation. There's no requirement to measure a quantum state and reproduce it.
Brent
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