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Re:Why not string theory? Because enough is enough by seanmcdirmid on Sunday June 12, 2016 @03:28AM (#11887096)
The idea that the universe runs on a simple program with simple rules hasn't failed us so far. All we have to do is figure out what that simple program is with our capability for abstract symbolic thinking and reasoning; machines are presently very bad at this while humans are less bad at it.
Re:Why not string theory? Because enough is enough by eli_gottlieb on Sunday June 12, 2016 @12:22PM (#11888808)
>The idea that the universe runs on a simple program with simple rules hasn't failed us so far.

Uhhhh... yes it has. The universe has myriad levels at which a simple program works. If the universe "really" runs on a simple program with simple rules, it's got so large a parameter space that even knowing the program itself is mostly useless to us.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6738

Re:Why not string theory? Because enough is enough by seanmcdirmid on Monday June 13, 2016 @01:31AM (#11891882)
A simple program running for billions years on trillions of bits...of course the result isn't going to be "simple." Still, knowing what the code would hardly be useless, and we are spending a lot of resources on trying to figure out.
Re:Why not string theory? Because enough is enough by ggggtez on Sunday June 12, 2016 @05:47AM (#11887409)
Look up automated proofs. This exists. It's largely useless, due to mathematical properties of logic. Every mathematical system has things which are true but can't be discovered from first principals.
Re:Why not string theory? Because enough is enough by leni536 on Sunday June 12, 2016 @07:36AM (#11887638)
> Every mathematical system has things which are true but can't be discovered from first principals.

This is not true, see Gödel's completeness theorem [1], which states "... that a deductive system of first-order predicate calculus is 'complete' in the sense that no additional inference rules are required to prove all the logically valid formulas." It basically means that every "true" statements are provable with a good enough deductive system.

What you possibly think about is Gödel's first incompleteness theorem [2] which is quite a different statement. It states that in "most" formal systems (that are complex enough to be able to describe natural numbers) there is always a statement A that both A and "not A" are not provable. It basically means that these statements can't be "logically valid", which means that there exist models of the formal system where A is true and models where "not A" is true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_completeness_th... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

Re:Why not string theory? Because enough is enough by eru on Wednesday June 15, 2016 @11:49PM (#11913820)
Nah, P vs NP is a bigger factor here.

Basically, checking a proof for correctness takes polynomial time in the size of the proof. (Dependending on how you formalize your proofs, that might even be linear.)

Coming up with a reasonable sized proof is much harder. But if we had P=NP, then checking and finding a proof would be about equally hard.

See eg http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf