What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists

Re:What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physic... by Sacho on Friday August 12, 2016 @04:43AM (#12274147)

I think you're giving a good example of how poorly people visualize and understand infinity. A Turing Machine's capabilities are based on its infinite memory and infinite computation time, yet you imagine it as "a bunch of monks scribbling" and immediately dismiss its capabilities.

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Re:What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physic... by chriswarbo on Friday August 12, 2016 @06:40AM (#12274507)

I would actually restrict things further, since introducing infinity can lead to unintuitive results orthogonal to computability ;)

Rather than 'possessing' an infinite tape and infinite time, I prefer to think of turing machines as always being allowed to perform one more step, and always being allowed to use one more tape cell. I find this characterisation of time quite intuitive as-is, whilst the tape can be made intuitive by imagining tape factories on each end, which produce more cells whenever the read/write head gets close.

In fact, such "tape factories" have been used to build universal turing machines in the game of life http://rendell-attic.org/gol/fullutm/index.htm

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Re:What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physic... by wildmusings on Friday August 12, 2016 @11:42AM (#12276537)

An order of non-celibate monks can also work for infinite amount of time and hold infinite data. Anyhow, it's not really relevant to my point. An infinite number of scribbles doesn't seem any more likely to give rise to consciousness than any finite number.

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