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Does infinity exist?

plus.maths.org

81–90 of 127 posts

Re: Does infinity exist?

#81
post #62
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a computer cannot have infinite memory, then it cannot go beyond discrete finite automata (DFA) itself. Undecidable problems are several steps more complex than what a DFA can solve. In other words, the theoretical capability of a computer with finite memory is way less than a computer that can solve all but undecidable problems.

That's complicated. While a computer cannot, strictly speaking, have an infinite amount of memory (unless my understanding of physics is off-kilter, which is entirely plausible), computers do have an arbitrary amount of memory. Put another way, I don't know how much memory any given computer can access; for any computer you give me, I could imagine a computer with more memory. (Again, physics intercedes, so this is a…

Modeling it as infinite does not make any more sense than modeling it is having 1 googol^googol^googol memory cells, clearly above the physical limit, and therefore any differences between the two models are artifacts irrelevant to anything human civilization will ever encounter.

Google search term: finitism.

Re: Does infinity exist?

#82
post #34
post #27

The idea of different infinities is very important to programmers. In particular, they are the underlying reasons for undecidable problems. You can write any valid computer program as a string of finite length from a finite alphabet. This means the set of programs is countable. (This should not be surprising--everything is ones and zeroes, after all, so you always end up mapping your program to a really large natural…

I'd never thought about that before. I think you could use that argument to prove that strong AI is impossible. --------------- Consider an AI to be a chat program which maps strings to strings -- all the strings of its input over time to all the strings of its output. There are, by the argument above, an uncountable number of such mapping programs, only a countable number of which can actually be coded. So, enumerat…

That's assuming the consequent: you are assuming that such an enumeration strategy is requisite for strong AI to occur. [EDIT: I misunderstood what you meant by enumeration, my statement of your assumption is wrong. What you do assume is that in order to be able to outperform humans at any task a Strong AI must not be tripped by diagonalization. Or that humans would not be any such output, that is that the human can somehow step outside your conundrum.]

Yet it works just as well to consider humans to be char programs which map strings to strings. But then, they somehow manage exhibit Strong AI. Actually I believe Scott Aaronson has used this table look up type argument to show how you could theoretically pass the Turing Test.

Now imagine a lookup table that stores every possible history H of A and B’s conversation, and next to H, the action fB (H) that B would take next given that history. Of course, like Borges’ Library of Babel, the lookup table would consist almost entirely of meaningless nonsense, and it would also be much too large to fit inside the observed universe. But all that matters for us is that the lookup table would be finite, by the assumption that there is a finite upper bound on the conversation length. This implies that the function fB is computable (indeed, it can be recognized by a finite automaton!). From these simple considerations, we conclude that if there is a fundamental obstacle to computers passing the Turing Test, then it is not to be found in computability theory.

But you are going in the right direction. More developed versions of your argument lead to why a Bayes Optimal AI is not possible.

Note also that as Strong AI is a vague term I have defaulted to the nearest solid metric: prove it is conscious.

Re: Does infinity exist?

#83
post #39
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put another way, you can't pick numbers from an infinite sample space because you can't create an infinite sample space. That's not true; there's nothing wrong with infinite sample spaces. It's just that there's just no such thing as a uniform distribution over an infinite space. For example, suppose you flip a fair coin repeatedly until the first time it comes up Heads. The number of flips you end up making could be…

How about generating an infinite sequence of bits to generate any positive integer (in binary) with uniform probability? Sure it will take infinite time, but so may the method in your note. As another comment here points out, it would take infinite time to write down a purely random number anyways.

Parents method produces a result in finite time with probability infinitesimally close to 1. Yours produces a result in finite with probability infinitesimally close to 0. That is the greatest measurable difference in all of mathematics.

In other words, on method basically always succeeds, the other never succeeds (not "fails", but "never succeeds")

Re: Does infinity exist?

#84
post #82
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd never thought about that before. I think you could use that argument to prove that strong AI is impossible. --------------- Consider an AI to be a chat program which maps strings to strings -- all the strings of its input over time to all the strings of its output. There are, by the argument above, an uncountable number of such mapping programs, only a countable number of which can actually be coded. So, enumerat…

That's assuming the consequent: you are assuming that such an enumeration strategy is requisite for strong AI to occur. [EDIT: I misunderstood what you meant by enumeration, my statement of your assumption is wrong. What you do assume is that in order to be able to outperform humans at any task a Strong AI must not be tripped by diagonalization. Or that humans would not be any such output, that is that the human can…

I'm not assuming an enumeration strategy is a prerequisite for strong AI. An enumeration strategy already exists. Heck, I don't even have to construct a mapping--a compiled program, when you get right down to it, is a number.

You are assuming human beings--with all of their code and inputs--can be mapped to numbers. I'd say that's the more unlikely assumption, given that we don't completely understand how they work. Heck, I don't think we're even sure they're deterministic.

Re: Does infinity exist?

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The classic approach is to move all the existing guests from room n to n+1 and put the new party in room 1.

I can see how that works if you have an infinite number of rooms and an infinite number of guests, because you still have an unoccupied room to move them up into. But how does that work when you've stated that all rooms are occupied? I'm really struggling to square up my understanding of how the former problem works with my intuition that if every room is in an occupied state, you can't magic up some in an unoccupied…

Your intuition is correct. The hotel paradox is a trick of symbolic manipulation, and the analogy to a real hotel is an amusing deceptive misdirection.

Re: Does infinity exist?

#86
post #27

The idea of different infinities is very important to programmers. In particular, they are the underlying reasons for undecidable problems. You can write any valid computer program as a string of finite length from a finite alphabet. This means the set of programs is countable. (This should not be surprising--everything is ones and zeroes, after all, so you always end up mapping your program to a really large natural…

A few parts of this are inaccurate.

Undecidability is about the impossibility of predicting what programs will do. You have proven that there are functions from integers to integers that we cannot program, but that is not at all the same thing. Deciding whether a Turing machine will halt is one of these functions, but proving that is different than just proving that such functions exist.

Your proof that there are unprovable statements also doesn't work, as can be seen from the fact that some theories are decidable, such as Presburger arithmetic, which is the theory of the natural numbers without multiplication. The flaw here is your correspondence between propositions about naturals and functions from the naturals to the booleans. It's not clear how you want to set up this bijection, but there is actually no way of doing so, as the set of propositions about the naturals expressible in any alphabet is the same size as the naturals, by the same argument you use in your second paragraph. It therefore must be smaller, rather than the same size as, the set of functions from ℕ to the booleans.

Re: Does infinity exist?

#87
post #61
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so the occupants of n+1 would have to move to n+2 , the occupants of n+2 would have to move to n+3 , and so on. Somewhere, the occupants of n+infinity-1 and n+infinity would have to share a room, but I guess everyone accepts this issue because you'd never actually reach rooms n+infinity-1 and n+infinity by counting/visiting. I'm no mathematician, but this seems to be an edge phenomenon that everyone is willing…

Infinity is not a number . There is no room 'n+infinity'. There's just not such a room, anywhere, even in principle. Each guest n can move to room n+1 because the guest there is moving to n+2. This works. That's the point. And you couldn't, in fact, tell the guests to run down the hallway to find an empty room: There is no empty room until you move everyone. Infinity is counterintuitive, you say? Well, yes, that's th…

Not just counterintuitive, but counterfactual and counterphysical. You can't "do it", you can only "model it in the realm of formal mathematics", which by the way proves that this model is not a model of reality, and infinite hotels cannot exist in physics. If you push the physical analysis further, you can get into the speed of light and bosons.

Re: Does infinity exist?

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am thoroughly confused as to what your point is. What is the problem with Swizec's wording in your view? Should s/he have written "Can you make room for more guests?". I agree that you could argue that right now there is no room free, and that the answer should be No because of that. However, given that you can easily make one room free by having every guest go to the next room, that just seems overly nit-picky to…

The part that makes the assertion false is "...all of which are currently occupied." Moving n to n+1 only works when that restriction is lifted.

No, because the people in n+1 simultaneously move to n+2. (and so on)

Re: Does infinity exist?

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. They must move to room n+2.

But how do you get a situation where there is one more room than occupants, if both are infinite and matched up?

You rematch. Mathematically, not physically! There isn't' "one more", all finite differences between infinite sets are equivalent to each other, including zero.

Ponder this if you will: how did the hotel get full in the first place? if you assume that is possible, then you can reverse the original room assignments, and reassign rooms.

The source of your confusion is that you trusted the problem is even possible to set up, without availing yourself of the power that the setup implies.

Re: Does infinity exist?

#90

I find this question very perplexing. I can't tell if it arises from a misunderstanding of the concept of "existence" or just a misunderstanding of how important infinities are in a massive number of real world applications. I mean, two doesn't really "exist"; but we sure as hell need it if we want to get any work done.

In the real world, infinity is a convenient shorthand for describing a limit process. In the real world, nothing ever reaches its limit exactly, everything is an approximation with at best a finite error range.
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