From: John K Clark (johnkclark@fastmail.fm)
Date: Sat Nov 24 2007 - 09:15:29 MST
On Fri, 23 Nov 2007 "Harry Chesley" <chesley@acm.org>
> The issue here seems to be the fine line between
> true randomness and chaotic systems.
No, although the issue of chaos, the idea that very small changes in
initial conditions could lead to huge changes in outcome it yet another
reason you will never be certain what an AI will do. But that wasn’t
what I was talking about.
Even if you live in a universe that was completely deterministic and
randomness did not exist, even if you discount chaos, even if you ignore
the influence of the outside environment, I could still write in 5
minutes a very short program that will behave in ways NOBODY or NOTHING
in the known universe understands; it would simply be a program that
looks for the first even number greater than 4 that is not the sum of
two primes greater than 2, and when it finds that number it then stops.
When will this program stop, will it ever stop? There is no way to tell,
all you can do is watch it and see what it does, and randomness or chaos
or the environment has nothing to do with it.
I am much smarter and more complex than this program, and yet it has the
capacity to surprise me. You think this simple minded little program can
do something that a Jupiter Brain cannot do; I think otherwise.
John K Clark
-- John K Clark johnkclark@fastmail.fm -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Same, same, but different…
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