On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 12:41 AM, Russell Standish <[email protected]>wrote:
> Rational agents are entirely predictable. Rational agents are entirely deterministic but that does NOT mean they're predictable. It would only take you a few minutes to write a program to look for the first even number greater than 2 that is not the sum of two prime numbers and then stop. But will the machine your program is running on ever stop before it runs out of memory X? Nobody knows. There is no shortcut to knowing, there is no way to make a prediction, all you can do is watch it and see what it does. And when the computer ends up doing whatever it ends up doing the machine will be just as surprised at its behavior as you are; it didn't know what it was going to do any better than you did. If the computer stopped then afterward it figured it must have chosen to stop, and if the computer didn't stop then it figured it chose to ram the memory wall, but in either case it didn't know what it was going to do until it did it, and neither did you. 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.
