On 12 December 2014 at 08:10, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > On 11 December 2014 at 18:59, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> > wrote: >> >> >> On Thursday, December 11, 2014, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> Maybe it's a delayed choice experiment and retroactively collapses the >>> wave function, so your choice actually does determine the contents of the >>> boxes. >>> >>> (Just a thought...maybe the second box has a cat in it...) >>> >> No such trickery is required. Consider the experiment where the subject is >> a computer program and the clairvoyant is you, with the program's source >> code and inputs. You will always know exactly what the program will do by >> running it, including all its deliberations. If it is the sort of program >> that decides to choose both boxes it will lose the million dollars. The >> question of whether it *ought to* choose both boxes or one is meaningless if >> it is a deterministic program, and the paradox arises from failing to >> understand this. > > Not trickery, how dare you?! An attempt to give a meaningful answer which > actually makes something worthwhile from what appears to be a trivial > "paradox" without any real teeth. > > But OK since you are determined to belittle my efforts, let's try your > approach. > > 1 wait 10 seconds > 2 print "after careful consideration, I have decided to open both boxes" > 3 stop > > This is what ANY deterministic computer programme (with no added random > inputs) would boil down to, although millions of lines of code might take a > while to analyse, and the simplest way to find out the answer in practice > might be to run it (but each run would give the same result, so once it's > been run once we can replace it with my simpler version). > > I have to admit I can't see where the paradox is, or why there is any > interest in discussing it. > > My point, in case it wasn't clear, was that there is only a possible paradox > (or at least something worth discussing) if the oracle is unreliable. But NP > is stated in terms of a deterministic universe and an oracle that can > foresee the future 100% accurately, so the only possibility of a paradox > arises if it can be turned into a "grandfather paradox" via time-travel, > which is what I suggested.
I didn't mean to offend. I meant that no clever explanation is needed because, in my view, it isn't really paradoxical - which (in the deterministic case, which is how NP is usually stated) you seem to agree with. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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/d/optout.
