Turing Completeness of a Lump of Dirt [WAS Re: [agi] Conway's Game of Life and Turing machine equivalence]
William Pearson wrote: On 07/10/2007, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: William Pearson wrote: On 07/10/2007, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: The TM implementation not only has no relevance to the behavior of GoL(-T) at all, it also has even less relevance to the particular claims that I made about GoL (or GoL(-T)). If you think the TM implementation does impact it, you should demonstrate exactly how. The TM implementation has no impact *itself* to any claims, and its removal equally has no bearing on the properties of the whole system. The impact it does have is to demonstrate the system it is implemented in is Turing Complete. Or computationally universal if you wish to avoid say the word Turing. Lets say I implemented a TM on my laptop, and then had my operating system disallow that program to be run. Would it stop my laptop being computationally universal, and all that entails about its predictability? Nope, because the computational universality doesn't rest on that implementation, it is merely demonstrated by it. Well, I have to say that you have made a valiant effort to defend the idea, but nothing seems to be working. You argue that Game of Life is Turing Complete even when we exclude all the cases in which the initial cells are arranged to make a Turing Machine. You then try to justify this strange idea with an analogy. But in your analogy, you surrepticiously insert a system that is ALREADY a Turing Machine at the base level (your laptop) and then you implement ANOTHER Turing Machine on top of that one (your TM program running on the laptop). This is a false analogy. To do your analogy properly, you would have to say this: "Lets say I notice that my laptop is equivalent to a Turing Machine, and then I drill a one-inch diameter hole in the CPU, so that the laptop can no longer act as a Turing Machine. Would this stop my laptop being computationally universal, and all that entails about its predictability?" To which the answer is: well, yes it would! If the laptop were repaired, or if the atoms in the laptop were rearranged, then it would become a Turing Machine. Similarly, if the atoms in a lump of dirt were rearranged, the lump of dirt could be turned into a Turing Machine. So the logical extension of your argument is that a lump of dirt is Turing Complete just because the atoms have the POTENTIAL to be rearranged to make a Turing machine. In exactly the same way, the cells in Game of Life have the POTENTIAL to be rearranged to make a Turing Machine. But in both of these cases (lump of dirt and GoL) the sense in which "Turing Completeness" is being used is completely meaningless. Nothing follows from the conclusion that lumps of dirt are Turing Complete. Which was my original point. Richard Loosemore - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=51098346-0ae767
Re: Turing Completeness of a Lump of Dirt [WAS Re: [agi] Conway's Game of Life and Turing machine equivalence]
On 08/10/2007, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > William Pearson wrote: > > On 07/10/2007, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> William Pearson wrote: > >>> On 07/10/2007, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > >> The TM implementation not only has no relevance to the behavior of > >> GoL(-T) at all, it also has even less relevance to the particular claims > >> that I made about GoL (or GoL(-T)). > >> > >> If you think the TM implementation does impact it, you should > >> demonstrate exactly how. > > > > The TM implementation has no impact *itself* to any claims, and its > > removal equally has no bearing on the properties of the whole system. > > The impact it does have is to demonstrate the system it is implemented > > in is Turing Complete. Or computationally universal if you wish to > > avoid say the word Turing. > > > > Lets say I implemented a TM on my laptop, and then had my operating > > system disallow that program to be run. Would it stop my laptop being > > computationally universal, and all that entails about its > > predictability? Nope, because the computational universality doesn't > > rest on that implementation, it is merely demonstrated by it. > > Well, I have to say that you have made a valiant effort to defend the > idea, but nothing seems to be working. > > You argue that Game of Life is Turing Complete even when we exclude all > the cases in which the initial cells are arranged to make a Turing > Machine. You then try to justify this strange idea with an analogy. > > But in your analogy, you surrepticiously insert a system that is ALREADY > a Turing Machine at the base level (your laptop) and then you implement > ANOTHER Turing Machine on top of that one (your TM program running on > the laptop). This is a false analogy. Laptops aren't TMs. They have random access memory, registers, program counters not a tape and 5-tuple instructions. They are computationally universal, but that is all they share with TMs (as does the GoL). Please read the wiki entry to see that my laptop isn't a TM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine Will Pearson - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=51203540-99609d
Re: Turing Completeness of a Lump of Dirt [WAS Re: [agi] Conway's Game of Life and Turing machine equivalence]
From: "William Pearson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Laptops aren't TMs. Please read the wiki entry to see that my laptop isn't a TM. But your laptop can certainly implement/simulate a Turing Machine (which was the obvious point of the post(s) that you replied to). Seriously, people, can't we lose all these spurious arguments? We have enough problems communicating without deliberate stupidity. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=51210737-ef5850
Re: Turing Completeness of a Lump of Dirt [WAS Re: [agi] Conway's Game of Life and Turing machine equivalence]
On 08/10/2007, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > From: "William Pearson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Laptops aren't TMs. > > Please read the wiki entry to see that my laptop isn't a TM. > > But your laptop can certainly implement/simulate a Turing Machine (which was > the obvious point of the post(s) that you replied to). But in that case my analogy holds. Both GoL and my laptop can implement a TM, neither *are* TMs. Both are computationally universal. Richard Loosemore's argument in the post I was replying to was based on saying my laptop was *already* a TM not, "can simulate a TM." He was trying to intimate some difference between the relation of my laptop to a TM and the relation between GoL and a TM. Which was incorrect. > Seriously, people, can't we lose all these spurious arguments? We have > enough problems communicating without deliberate stupidity. I am not being deliberately stupid, simply refuting his sloppy claim that a laptop is a TM in a way that the GoL isn't a TM. Will Pearson - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=51213184-8328c1
