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Re:Mathematics I Use (2012) by hinkley on Friday April 20, 2018 @11:08AM (#16885367)
And yet I’m constantly surprised by people knowing nothing of set theory. Occasionally someone who doesn’t know logic (evidenced by nasty, over-complicated Boolean logic)

Or my current favorite: a very senior and very optimistic person who apparently doesn’t believe in decidability, the halting problem, or NP completeness.

Re:Mathematics I Use (2012) by andrewflnr on Friday April 20, 2018 @04:37PM (#16888281)
Like, they think computers are just invincible problem solvers, or can't even really comprehend the question? I can't grok what it means to not believe in NP completeness.
Re:Mathematics I Use (2012) by hinkley on Friday April 20, 2018 @05:02PM (#16888411)
That developers can do anything if we stop complaining and get to work.

No, in fact we've proven there are a lot of things we can't do, and oceans of things that are theoretically possible but completely impractical to do (another class of people mistake intractable for impossible, but for small enough N sometimes it is both possible and worthwhile).

Re:Mathematics I Use (2012) by wolfgke on Friday April 20, 2018 @08:05PM (#16889250)
> Or my current favorite: a very senior and very optimistic person who apparently doesn’t believe in decidability, the halting problem, or NP completeness.

Undecidability and the halting problem is usually analysed for Turing machines (I am aware that there also exists literature on these problems for other types of automata). The problem is: It is impossible to build a Turing machine. Every computer that has been built up to know is just some kind of finite state machine. So the halting problem is perfectly (in a mathematical sense) deciable for real computer programs. The problem is: We have no idea how to do this in general in a timespan that is suitable for practical purposes.