From: Robin Lee Powell (rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org)
Date: Wed Oct 14 2009 - 10:05:41 MDT
I'm not going to bother to respond to that insane vitriol, but I
want to point out to every one else that JKC cut, and failed to
respond to, almost everything I wrote. Read what I actually wrote
for yourself, and see if you think there's anything in there he
should have replied to that he didn't.
-Robin
On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 08:59:17AM -0700, John K Clark wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Oct 2009 "Robin Lee Powell" <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>
> said:
>
> > I will not actually reproduce the math here; that would be rude
> > to the authors, at the very least, and copyright violation.
>
> As he has demonstrated numerous times the last thing in the world Robin
> Lee Powell would want to be is rude, but until this second I had no idea
> he was such a big fan of copyright law. There for a minute I thought
> that maybe the reason he didn't explain the math was that it was totally
> incomprehensible to him and might as well have been written in Chinese.
> But no, that's not the reason at all, it's the copyright thing. Yes, I'm
> sure that's the explanation, it's the copyright thing.
>
> > Run the algorithm for at most N+1 steps. At every step, mark
> > the state off in your enumeration. Stop when:
>
> > You reach a state (of both the FSM and memory) that Obviously if a computer
> > has a finite memory it would be possible in seen before. Since the Turing machine formalism is
> > entirely deterministic, the algorithm is in an infinite loop through this state, and you're done:
> > does not halt.
>
> I've got to admit that makes a lot of sense, but it seems oddly
> familiar, where did I see that before? Oh yes, now I remember, I said it
> myself several posts ago:
>
> "Obviously if a computer has a finite memory it would be possible in
> theory to keep a record of every state the machine goes into, and if you
> found that a state was repeated then you'd know for sure that the
> machine was in a infinite loop. But the trouble is that the machine
> needed to do all that checking would have to be much larger than the
> original machine, and that larger machine would have no way to know if
> it was itself in a infinite loop unless it was watched over by an even
> larger machine."
>
> > Stop When:
> > The algorithm runs out of memory.
>
> Again I can't disagree with that, but for some reason I am again
> overcome by a strong feeling of Deja View. I wonder what the cause could
> be. Maybe it was the post I sent sever posts before the previous one I
> quoted when I said:
>
> "So let's see, if you have a small memory you can prove that a computer
> will halt when it runs out of memory. Wow what a profound result! I can
> confidently predict that if you loaded Windows Vista into the original
> ENIAC from 1946 that machine will halt too."
>
> You quote the authors (I guess text is not covered by copyright law,
> just mathematics) as saying
> "the abovementioned proof is not novel in theoretical computer science."
> You also quote them as saying "Unfortunately, N will ordinarily be such
> a huge number that this result is only theoretical, it does not lead to
> a practical algorithm". But then, bizarrely, you say "Which was the
> point many of us have been trying to make".
>
> What the hell are you talking about? What's this "many of us" crap? It's
> the point I was trying to make but nobody agreed with me, that Turing
> was profound and this stuff about finite memory machines is vacuous,
> hell even the authors of the paper seem to think so. Since your short
> term memory is so bad I will repeat something I quoted a few paragraphs
> back that comes from one of my posts I sent about a dozen hours ago:
>
> "Obviously if a computer has a finite memory it would be possible in
> theory to keep a record of every state the machine goes into, and if you
> found that a state was repeated then you'd know for sure that the
> machine was in a infinite loop. But the trouble is that the machine
> needed to do all that checking would have to be much larger than the
> original machine, and that larger machine would have no way to know if
> it was itself in a infinite loop unless it was watched over by an even
> larger machine."
>
> That is almost exactly what the paper said, and the authors of this
> "paper" admit that it has no practical value and that they are saying
> nothing new, so it is a bit of a mystery why they bothered to write it
> in the first place, however there is no mystery why it is just online
> and not published in a real science journal. But you read (skimmed more
> likely) this piece of fluff and triumphantly announce "It does, in fact,
> prove that the halting problem is only undecidable for infinite
> computers" and then try to peddle the idea that some difficult problems
> could be solved if only the computer had LESS memory. Should I start
> pulling memory cards out of my computer now?
>
> >And, of course, none of this has anything to do whatsoever with goal systems
>
> Except that whenever you say "always do X, no exceptions" and X happens
> to be one of the infinite number of programs that produce infinite loops
> then your mighty AI turns into a useless lump of metal and silicon.
> Turing wins again.
>
> John K Clark
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> John K Clark
> johnkclark@fastmail.fm
>
> --
> http://www.fastmail.fm - Choose from over 50 domains or use your own
>
-- They say: "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons." And I'm thinking: "Does it even occur to you to try for something other than the default outcome?" See http://shrunklink.com/cdiz http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/
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