On 29 Dec 2016, at 11:33, Telmo Menezes wrote:
It looks like the computer with the instrcution "kill the user",
I love that idea!
Your computer is not the Universal Machine Bruno.
What? Of course it is. the infinite tape is the environment. It is
not part
of the machine. Turing discover the universal number, that is, if
phi_i is
an enumaration of the computable function by a Turing machine,
there is a
(finite) number u such that phi_u (x, y) = phi_x(y), provided that
u has
enough memory given. A universal machine is a universal finite code
only. I
insist on this because Turing made a pedagogical error in placing the
infinite tape as part as the definition of (any) Turing machine.
So, if I understand correctly, we could assume a finite circular tape
and still get the main theoretical CS results?
Not really, if that is all the memory available. You need, for being
universal, and for doing some arbitrary halting computation, to have a
finite but extendable memory. You need a potential infinite tape, but
not an actual one. All halting computations need a finite part of that
tape, but to be sure your machine can effectively do all computations,
you need to allow the universal machine to use its environment as a
memory.
Some computations will require both infinite time and infinite space
to be done, but again, not at any step of the computation.
If not, no computer, no brain, can be said to be universal.
"universal" is meant for the code or the body of the machine. All
digital machines are finite object, codable by (finite) numbers. The
universal machine *is* a finite number (when having chosen some
universal arithmetical base).
So I beg you to recognize the universality of my computer, even if
senile
:)
Ok, sorry abou that! :)
With comp we survive death, but in the same sense that we can survive
alzeimer, some amnesia is needed to be immortal.
It might need more
memory or a faster processor!
It surely needs that. But it needs mainly that the developpers do
not change
the program specification so that you have to buy a new computer. The
application Firefox is quite clear about this for example: it
literally told
me that I need a new processor, that is, a new computer ...
I agree. This is a complicated issue that touches many things,
somewhat related to the cultural sicknesses of our time: growth
obsession and consumerism leading to things like planned obsolescence
and the theatre of innovation.
On one hand I would say that we are now living in computational
dystopia. There is a war on general-purpose computing, and this war is
being fought by marketeers, business people and politicians against
the collective of computer users. I think Cory Doctorow has
interesting things to say about this:
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html
I said that if the USSR would have discovered the computer, they would
have sent it immediately to the goulag. The war against "general
purpose computer, which means universal machine)" is the same as the
war again education. Once a government is hijacked by liars, it will
hate people who can think.
I eagerly followed (and somewhat participated) in the open source /
free software efforts of the 90s, but that battle was lost. The
smartphone era sidestepped the (hard won) openness of regular
desktops, and the other punch was delivered by companies like Google,
that moved a lot of computations to the server (that is not under user
control). They can even run mostly free software on the server side
and still deny you any control.
The platforms themselves are tragedies. Over-engineered, unnecessarily
complex babel towers of abstraction, that result more from committees,
political compromise and a preference for mindless "productivity" over
deep thinking and taste. Suppose a kid wants to open a computer and
start coding a simple game, for example. This should be the simplest
thing, but the amount of friction (both intentional and incidental)
that is now placed on this activity compared to the situation in the
80s is almost tragic.
The "deep thinking" schools of practical computation are gone and
defeated. I could cite the Lisp tradition and the Lisp-machine dream,
as well as Alan Key's Smalltalk (his presentations on YouTube are
worth watching). These are two very different approaches with some
things in common: a desire to make computer systems both
understandable and programmable all the way down.
Unfortunately, there is much more money to be made in transforming
computers into locked-down, highly monitored media consumption
devices.
They confuse means and goal. In the health domain, it means they
invest in disease instead of health (like other will invest in war
instead of peace). That happens when greedy liars got power, and that
happened by our fault of having tolerated that the state can decide
what is good or bad food or medication for us, which is basically an
anti-constitutional idea.
It is false that power hates intelligence, but fake powers, like fake
religions hate intelligence.
It remind me a friend who was teaching mathematics and was explicitly
asked to not be too much clear. He lost his job because all its
students get good notes, and were very good indeed, thanks to his
great pedagogical qualities. Some inspector said to him that he was
showing that math is easy for everybody when math was supposed to be
used to select people. Literally. They want dumb people using dumb
machines.
Bruno
Telmo.
(it's a curve of probability of dying x age)
Do you guys think this idea has any merit?
A lot. But today, we cannot still explain why the weirdness is not
bigger,
even here and now,
Maybe it is big and we are used to it?
Like the infinities in quantum field theory? In science we are
supposed to
not accept such thing unless we find some explanation of how to get
rid of
the weirdness.
But computationalism seems to go toward Feyman's explanation of
quantum
physics. the weirdest "path" are eliminated by the phase
randomization, as
we get already something close to the "phase" and the
"randomization", but
it is a hell of a difficulty to get their correct relations.
Bruno
but we can't be sure that we can renormalize all
infinities in arithmetic (seen from inside), so the inflation of
possibilities is a persistent threat of the universal machine
sanity.
Regarding the season, my wishes for you all: live long and
prosper!
Merry After-Christmas and Happy New Year!
Bruno
Telmo.
--
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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list
.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-
list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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 everything-
[email protected].
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
