From: Bradley Thomas (brad36@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Oct 13 2009 - 23:49:51 MDT
>Additionally, I do disagree with the notion that any algorithm is
necessarily either halting or representing an infinite loop.
Yes, this is correct. There are real programs that (given unpatterned input
data) can find themselves neither halting nor in a repeating (patterned)
infinite loop, although even these programs will all either halt or repeat
some prior state eventually.
Brad Thomas
www.bradleythomas.com
Twitter @bradleymthomas, @instansa
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-sl4@sl4.org [mailto:owner-sl4@sl4.org] On Behalf Of Arets
Paeglis
Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 11:06 PM
To: sl4@sl4.org
Subject: Re: [sl4] I am a Singularitian who does not believe in the
Singularity.
More so, the concept of "prior point" does not need to be directly related
to a prior point in user's interaction with the program (as would be in the
scenario with MS Word), such as undoing changes or reverting to older set of
data. By definition, it means some prior state during the program's
execution flow, the simplest and most trivial example being any cyclical
operator:
for (i = 1; i < 10; i++)
{
i = x; // during the cycle, execution flow will return 10 times to this
state
do_something(i);
do_something_else(i);
}
Additionally, I do disagree with the notion that any algorithm is
necessarily either halting or representing an infinite loop.
On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:50 AM, John K Clark <johnkclark@fastmail.fm>
wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Oct 2009 "Bradley Thomas" <brad36@gmail.com said:
>
>> *My point is that any real algorithm in any real computer is
>> automatically in an infinite loop. In the sense that it has to return
>> to a prior state sooner or later
>
> What on earth are you talking about? You start the Microsoft Word
> program and write a novel with. When you are finished the program does
> not "have" to return to the original state it was in before you
> started writing, as a matter of fact I think you'd be a little annoyed
> at Microsoft if it did.
>
> John K Clark
>
>
>
> --
> John K Clark
> johnkclark@fastmail.fm
>
> --
> http://www.fastmail.fm - A no graphics, no pop-ups email service
>
>
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