On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 Pierz <[email protected]> wrote: > > Here's something that bothers me when I try to think of the brain too much > as a computer. How would I teach a computer the notion of infinity? >
A computer already knows about some integers, and it knows how to find the successor to some integers; it's true that it doesn't know how to find the successor to all the integers because there are too many of them, but you and I don't know how to do that either. And for a few hundred dollars you can buy a program to run on your home computer that can deal with infinity, Mathematica; it has a symbol for infinity, and it is the English word "infinity". So if you tell Mathematica to evaluate 1/infinity it will tell you it's zero. Mathematica can also tell you what the sum of a sequence of numbers is, like 1/1^2 + 1/2^2 + 1/3^2 +....1/N^2 , and if you tell Mathematica that N= "infinity" it will tell you that the sum of that sequence is PI^2/6 which is correct. It would look like this: InIn[1]: [image: Click for copyable input] Out[1]= John K Clark In[1]:= [image: Click for copyable input] Out[1]= 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/d/optout.
