From: Robin Lee Powell (rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org)
Date: Tue Oct 13 2009 - 11:31:55 MDT
On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 09:38:07AM -0700, John K Clark wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Oct 2009 "Robin Lee Powell"
>
> > John: the problem you're talking about simply doesn't exist in real
> > computers.
>
> Like hell it doesn't! Why do you think programs unexpectedly hang?
I've been a sysadmin and programmer for 15 years; I know *exactly*
why programs hang, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the
halting problem. 90+% of the time it's either I/O contention, or a
concurrency deadlock of some kind, neither of which are an infinite
loop in any sense at all (hint: concurrency on modern computers does
not use looping to wait for resources).
> Before Turing nearly everybody assumed that a finite algorithm
> would be found that cuts through all that recursive stuff and just
> tells you if a program will send you into an infinite loop or not.
> What Turing found is that such an algorithm does not exist, and
> the implications of his discovery are vast.
The implications are not what you think they are, in any way, as
many people have pointed out. Until you actually find a hole in the
math in that article, I'm done.
-Robin
-- 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/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:04 MDT