Okay I grant you that the Deep Blue machine is part of the sediment buried under Moore's Law -- had not looked at the benchmarks as closely as I should have it was late at night and I am going to stick with that answer :) As for the larger discussion I guess it boils down to my doubt about the theoretical possibility of a universal computer. Every computer that we know about executes within a defined context -- its execution context, and within a local frame of reference under which it is executing. The execution context is bounded and limited and does not and IMO cannot extend infinitely. Though I am pretty certain others may disagree and will argue that a universal computer can exist that executes in a universal all encompassing context. I do not see how this can be. The computer requires a substrate in which to operate upon -- the CPU chips for example are what our computers operate on. I know of no computer that does not require this external structured environment -- necessary to exist outside of itself so to speak in order for it to be able to operate on this substrate. Every computer in existence requires external enabling hardware. If a computer requires a substrate which it can manipulate in order to perform its logical operations then a universal computer is impossible because the substrate would necessarily be outside and foundational to its domain. In any non-universal computer we are back to the limits posed by execution context and local frame of reference. A process may be shown to be deterministic within some frame, within an execution context, but because -- I argue -- there can be no all encompassing universal execution context that does not itself rely on some external substrate to enable its basic operations -- there will always be other execution contexts and processes which are operating independently of any context. Now when different execution contexts begin communicating messages to each other how can a global outcome be said to be deterministic within the scope of any given execution context. Each single execution context is operating in its own frame of reference and will be generating outcomes based on its own frame. However its own frame is not completely isolated from other frames of reference in the larger linked meta systems -- say the internet as a single loosely coupled dynamic entity for example comprised of perhaps billions of connected devices each operating in its own local frame. I find the idea that this massive meta entity of millions and millions of separate servers can be described as being deterministic in it's whole. The individual executing agents or processes -- that together when linked by the trillions of messages being sent back and forth comprise this larger meta entity -- can be modeled in a deterministic fashion within their individual frames of reference and execution contexts. But can one say the same thing about the larger meta entity that emerges from the subtle interactions of the many hundreds of millions of executing processes that dynamically impinge on it and through which it emerges? When one speaks of outcomes, they often depend on subtle variables that are rapidly varying for example such that the results of running a function may change from instant to instant. While within the execution context of the function producing the result we can prove it is deterministic once this function is loosely linked to other separately running execution frames it becomes harder to deterministically predict any given outcome until some threshold of complexity and noise is reached where it becomes impossible to work back from the outcome and show how it has been determined. Metaphorically I suppose you could imagine a pond and random pebbles being tossed into it from many various directions. At first it will be possible to analyze the ripples and their interference patterns and work back to the time and place of each pebble hitting the water event and determine the angle, size speed etc. of each pebble. But play this forward and keep throwing more and more pebbles onto the pond's surface from different angles and speeds. After some time can one work back to the first pebble and determine the specifics of that single event? Obviously in practice we cannot do so no matter how much computing power we throw at the problem because the interactions and interference patterns of the millions of ripples spreading out from different points will grow exponentially more difficult, until all the computers in the universe working together would be unable to solve the problem.... for a big enough pond that is of course. Perhaps one could even invoke quantum erasure -- and state that once an event has become so interfered with by other events that all trace of it cannot be distinguished from the noise in the system then in a sense has not that event been erased? And yet the current state of the system in an infinitesimally miniscule way has been affected by it through an exceedingly long chain of events leading to other events and so forth. Determinism depends on having a frame of reference and can only be defined within some frame of reference. I do not see how universal determinism can be demonstrated, perhaps I am wrong and it can be -- if so I would like to hear how it can be logically proved. Cheers, -Chris
________________________________ From: John Clark <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, August 23, 2013 10:48 AM Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test? On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Chris de Morsella <[email protected]> wrote: >>> If it's not random then it happened for a reason, and things happen in a >>> computer for a reason too. > >> Sure, but the "reason" may not be amenable to being completely contained >> within the confines of a deterministic algorithm What on earth are you talking about? The deterministic algorithm behaves as it does for a reason but does not do so for a reason??!! > if it depends on a series of outside processes If it depends on something then it's deterministic. > > At the time it may have been a supercomputer but that was 16 years agoand > > the computer you're reading this E mail message on right now is almost > > certainly more powerful than the computer that beat the best human chess > > player in the world. And chess programs have gotten a lot better too. So > > all that spaghetti and complexity at the cellular level that you were > > rhapsodizing about didn't work as well as an antique computer running a > > ancient chess program. >> > > You are incorrect even today Deep Blue is still quite powerful compared to a > PC Not unless your meaning of "powerful" is radically diferent from mine. > The Deep Blue machine specs: > It was a massively parallel, RS/6000 SP Thin P2SC-based system with 30 nodes, >with each node containing a 120 MHz P2SC microprocessor for a total of 30, >enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips. Its chess playing program >was written in C and ran under the AIX operating system. It was capable of >evaluating 200 million positions per second, twice as fast as the 1996 >version. In June 1997, Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful supercomputer >according to the TOP500 list, achieving 11.38 GFLOPS on the High-Performance >LINPACK benchmark.[12] > OK. > I doubt the machine you are writing your email on even comes close to that level of performance; I know mine does not achieve that level of performance. > Are you really quite sure of that? The computer I'm typing this on is an ancient iMac that was not top of the line even back a full Moore's Law generation ago when it was new, back in the olden bygone days of 2011. Like all computers the number of floating point operations per second it can perform depends on the problem, but in computing dot products running multi-threaded vector code it runs at 34.3 GFOPS; so Deep Blue running at 11.38 GFLOPS doesn't seem as impressive as it did in 1997. Right now the fastest supercomputer in the world has a LINPACK rating of 54.9 pentaflops, a pentaflop IS A MILLION GFLOPS; so today that Chinese supercomputer is 4.8 millions times as powerful as Deep Blue was in 1997. And in just a few years that supercomputer will join Deep Blue on the antique computer junk pile. John K Clark > > > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
