71–80 of 91 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find myself wondering if anyone has done a proper analysis to prove that human activity is Turing complete!
It is so, trivially; humans wrote the find/replace box in Notepad++.
Nice one to add to the list of accidentally Turing complete systems. What's your favourite :)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know the basic syntax and I never have that problem. Perhaps you mean the advanced syntax? However I don't see the problem, there either. I usually don't need it, and to be honest, when I do, I find it more maintainable to use multiple simpler expressions combined with some programming.
You must not have suffered enough, I mean used regexs widely enough. He meant “syntax” in the sense that different regex engines have different syntax and capabilities - can I do a negative look ahead assertion in engines Z, how do I do a zero width lookaround in pcre, gnu, python, posix, etc. Depending how far down the rabbit hole you want to go, start here: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are guaranteed to halt, e.g lifespan. After death cells enter apoptosis stage where cells do final stages upon shutting down. I’d say it appears we are Turing complete, or at least it appears so from this angle
Given that Turing machines cannot be guaranteed to halt (and it's trivial to write an infinitely-running Turing machine), therefore humans are not, technically, Turing-complete.
I was under the impression that RegEx was not turing complete. Is there something special about N++’s regex engine that allows this?
No, nothing special about N++ (well, lookahead, but many regex engines have that). Repeated Search+Replace is the key, and not part of regex.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are guaranteed to halt, e.g lifespan. After death cells enter apoptosis stage where cells do final stages upon shutting down. I’d say it appears we are Turing complete, or at least it appears so from this angle
Given that Turing machines cannot be guaranteed to halt (and it's trivial to write an infinitely-running Turing machine), therefore humans are not, technically, Turing-complete.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not relevant as to whether it's a turing machine or not, tho... The possible calculations (and genericity) is what matters. The "button for each step" could be analogous to powering the turing machine, or turning some crank for Babbage's machine, or whatever..
This is absolutely relevant, turing's original definition described a completely autonomous and automatic machine, that's why every turing machine has a halting state that locks it in a loop when computation is finished. >could be analogous to powering the turing machine, or turning some crank for Babbage's Those things are done once for those machines, you press power-on or turn a crank for just one time and the mac…
That's just an accidental part, and is orthogonal to the manual "click next".
The halting state absolutely will be there, locked in a loop and everything, you just manually click to step over each iteration of that loop.
As said, the "click next" is no different that a clock signal in a CPU, or manually cranking the turing machine to play.
It's not at all relevant to the abstraction.
>Your computer is not a computer without a hardware clock, the repeated pressing of a button is acting as a hardware clock here.
Which is exactly why it's an irrelevant detail to the turing machine computation. It's just the clock, not the digital logic.
Whether the hardware clock is internal, or external, or I have a mule rotate around a millstone to drive it, or a big chunk of quartz, is irrelevant, as long the machine is receiving it. This includes me clicking a button to send a pulse.
Let's put it another way, what you're saying is isomorphic to:
"This setup is not a turing machine but this exact setup plus a while loop to repeatedly call xsendkey for Enter is".