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Re:Machines That Will Think and Feel by mirimir on Saturday March 19, 2016 @10:00AM (#11318538)
Anything can be virtualized on general computers.
Re:Machines That Will Think and Feel by JoshCole on Saturday March 19, 2016 @04:27PM (#11320277)
This is incorrect. Assume nested virtualization. Extrapolate to infinity. On a computer, understood to be one like ours, it follows that there is now a machine that executes in finite steps will have arrived past infinity. Moreover, there are higher countings of infinity and these would of necessity be within such a virtualization. So it can't even reasonably be expected to compute everything even if you just have a very small sub-set of everything.
Re:Machines That Will Think and Feel by mirimir on Sunday March 20, 2016 @10:42AM (#11323086)
Well, I did say "anything" and not "everything".
Re:Machines That Will Think and Feel by inlineint on Saturday March 19, 2016 @12:12PM (#11319045)
Only on quantum computers of sufficient size. And we are far from having idea about how to actually build them.
Re:Machines That Will Think and Feel by drdeca on Saturday March 19, 2016 @02:58PM (#11319900)
Huh? It is my understanding that the current understanding is that quantum computers cannot compute anything that ordinary computers can. They can just compute certain things faster.

A quantum computer can be simulated on a normal computer, just inefficiently.

Re:Machines That Will Think and Feel by inlineint on Friday March 25, 2016 @04:14AM (#11358979)
Ordinary computer can't model even a small quantum system exactly in finite time because it has to deal with infinite-dimension matrices to do it. In other hands, quantum computer could model any quantum system of the same size by one-to-one mapping of degrees of freedom. So you could build a quantum computer that just models your computer and do anything you could do on your ordinary computer on the quantum one.

If you are interested in the subject try to read this book http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Universe-Quantum-Computer-... (you can skip the parts about the Universe as quantum computer because they are controversial and a kind of metaphysics, just read a few first chapters to pick up the idea of quantum computations).