On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 11:38 PM, Charles Goodwin <crg1...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi everyone and everything, I was discussing comp and similar things with > Liz the other day and we came across a sticking point in what I think (from > memory) is step 7 of the UDA. Maybe you can help? > > I'm assuming AR, "Yes, Doctor" and so on. At step 7 we reach the point where > we assume that a physical Universal Dovetailer can be created and that it > runs forever, and ask what is the probability that my observer moments are > generated by it, rather than by my brain. > > Now ISTM that the UD will have an infinite number of possible programmes to > run, so even if it runs forever, how does it get on to the second step in > any of them?
Every program can be mapped to a natural number (intuitively, imagine the binary encoding of a program in any Turing-complete language). With something akin to the binary encoding (more abstractly, you can do this to the state table of a Universal Turing Machine), program size increases with their numbers. Then the dovetailer proceeds like so: - execute step 1 of program 1 - execute step 2 of program 1 - execute step 1 of program 2 - execute step 3 of program 1 - execute step 2 of program 2 - execute step 1 of program 3 ... So it will only take finite time for all the computable programs of up to a certain size to finish. Telmo. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
