At 10:42 am 21/12/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>Mike Carrell wrote:
>>The Lord works in mysterious ways.
>
>Jed: He would if he existed, but he doesn't so he doesn't.
Frank; Yes he does.
Jed: No he doesn't . . .
It was not a loop! You are missing my point. Even if it is the Lord who works, his ways are not mysterious. Each and every mechanism in nature appears to be comprehensible to man. So far we have not discovered any mysteries that appear to be unsolvable.
Perhaps in 100 million years or so we will finally run up against the limits of our imagination and skill, and even our super intelligent computers will not be able to work out the laws of physics beyond a certain level of detail. That might happen, but I doubt it. I expect that Jefferson was correct when he predicted that knowledge and well-being will advance, "not infinitely, as some have said, but indefinitely, and to a term which no one can fix and foresee." Knowledge resembles Einstein's universe: it is finite but unbounded.
I realize that Wolfram's hypothesis is that the complexity cannot be "reverse engineered" back to the starting point, just as cellular automata or trapdoor cryptographic code cannot be reverted to the starting point. But I disagree. (As it happens, one of the most vital NSA and commercial cryptographic algorithms -- which people thought would never be compromised -- has just fallen prey to a clever Chinese researcher at Tsinghua U, rah, rah! See: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/info-tech/mg18825301.600)
- Jed
