--- David Clark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I could care less about Turing machines or infinite memories. If you want > to create an AGI, you will have to use real life computers and real life > software, not imaginary musings.
I will try one more time to explain why a computer with finite memory cannot simulate itself and why this is important to AGI. Suppose machine A has 1 MB of memory and machine B has 2 MB. They may have different instruction sets. You have a program written for A but you want to test it on B to see if it will work on A. So you write a program on B that simulates A. Your simulator has to include a 1 MB array to represent A's memory. You load the test program in this array, simulate running A's instructions and get the output that you would have gotten on A. If you reversed the roles, you could not do it because you would need to declare a 2 MB array on a computer with only 1 MB of memory. The best you could do is simulate a machine like B but with a smaller memory. For some test programs you will get the same answer, but for others your simulation will get an out of memory error, whereas the real program would not. This is a probabilistic model. It is useful, but not 100% accurate. Now suppose you wanted to simulate A on A. (You may suspect a program has a virus and want to see what it would do without actually running it). Now you have the same problem. You need an array to reprsent your own memory, and it would use all of your memory with no space left over for your simulator program. This is true even if you count disk and virtual memory, because that has to be part of your simulation too. Why is this important to AGI? Because the brain is a computer with finite memory. When you think about how you think, you are simulating your own brain. Whatever model you use must be a simplified approximation, because you don't have enough memory to model it exactly. Any such model cannot give the right answer every time. So the result is we perceive our own thoughts as having some randomness, and this must be true whether the brain is deterministic or not. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- 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=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
