Kory Heath wrote: > On Nov 24, 2008, at 5:26 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > >> Kory Heath wrote: >> >>> On Nov 23, 2008, at 11:24 AM, Brent Meeker wrote: >>> >>>> Kory Heath wrote: >>>> >>>>> Or maybe I'm still misdiagnosing the problem. Is anyone arguing >>>>> that, >>>>> when you play back the lookup table like a movie, this counts as >>>>> performing all of the Conway's Life computations a second time? >>>>> >>>> Why shouldn't it? >>>> >>> Please see my recent response to Bruno. If we perform a complex >>> computation which results in placing the integer "5" into some memory >>> variable, and then later we copy the contents of that memory variable >>> to some other location in memory, in what sense are we re-performing >>> the original complex computation? >>> >> That's different since, ex hypothesi, the original calculation was >> complex. So >> we can say just putting the answer, 5, in a register is not >> repeating the >> calculation based on some complexity measure of the process. >> > > But the Conway's Life calculations are "complex" in the sense that I > meant the term. If we have a grid of cells filled with a pattern of > bits, and we point at one particular cell and ask, "If we iterate the > Conway's Life rule on this grid a trillion times, will this bit be on > or off?", we have to perform a bunch of computations to answer the > question. If we store the results of those computations, and then > later someone points at that same cell and asks the same question, and > I just look up the answer, I don't see how we can say that that act of > looking up the answer counts as re-performing the original > computation. Are you arguing that it does? > > -- Kory > No, I'm saying it doesn't.
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