On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 , meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: >> John Clark should get a kick out of this: >> >> http://www.scottaaronson.com/talks/ >> > > In computer science, we deal all the time with processes that are > neither deterministic nor random. >
BULLSHIT! > An example is a nondeterministic finite automaton: if you’re in state s2 > and you see symbol a, you could stay where you are or you could transition > to state s3. But we don’t put probabilities on these two arrows: we just > say that either could happen. > If you don't use probabilities then you must follow where both paths go, and that is deterministic. If you wish to make use of true probabilities you will need to add a hardware random number generator attachment to your computer because in any computer that is not malfunctioning they will ALWAYS do things for a reason regardless of what program they are running. If your program calls for a change in state of your computer to happen for no reason you've got to have some hardware where things happen for no reason, like a hardware random number generator. The guy starts off by saying he was more interested in being entertaining than being correct, but I didn't find him to be either. John K Clark Even more basic, when we design an algorithm, we don’t know which input it’s going to get, we usually don’t even know a probability distribution over inputs. All we know is, we want the thing to work for ANY input. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
