Steve Sloan wrote:
Russell Chapman wrote:
I happened to be looking for an old email in my mail folders when I
came across some stuff I had saved from mid 1996 from the list. I
know we went through all this 5 years ago, but I can't remember -
did we ever determine when the list actually started? I'm sure
there are people here who were here well before me (Julia and Steve
for starters), so it must be close to a decade old.
The list is 10 years, 13 days old. Happy Anniversary!
I just searched through my hard drive to find my oldest saved emails.
I found a zip file containing archived digests from before I joined,
including digest number #1. The first post of digest #1 was sent by
Stewart Blandon on Mon, 15 Apr 1996 12:03:13 -0700 (PDT).
IIRC, digest mode was not set up on the first day of the list. I
think the first day of the list was sometime in the 6th-10th range. I
could be wrong, though.
[Julia's first post was time stamped Tue, 23 Apr 1996 08:46:07 -0500
(CDT), eight days after the first list post.]
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 08:46:07 -0500 (CDT) From: Julia Thompson
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: BRIN-L@cornell.edu Subject: Re: Godel & Turing
problem
On Tue, 23 Apr 1996, Yee Yang Li Hector wrote:
Just wondering:
If you're familiar with the Godel incompleteness theorem and the
Turing
halting problem (I've had a passing familiarity with them), could
someone
try to explain away the existence of sentient computers in the
Galactic Center / the Startide universe / the Heart of the comet /
Earth
universes?
If I recall correctly, Godel's theorem shows that any formal system
that
included arithmetic was either incomplete or inconsistent. Does
that not mean that any computation system cannot be sentient
because it cannot include arithmetic?
Someone mentioned this in one of the newsgroups I subscribe to (can't
remember which one, unfortunately) and pointed us to an essay he had
put on the web:
http://www.sdsc.edu/~jeff/Godel_vs_AI.html
I would recommend reading this, if you're interested in the Godel/AI
issue.
Julia Thompson
The link still works. I'm impressed. And I still recommend it. :)
(That particular e-mail address I posted from is no longer valid, though.)
Julia
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