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Computation as a universal and fundamental concept

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Re: Computation as a universal and fundamental concept

#11

Post by eth0up »

Maxatar wrote: post #7
eth0up wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I am wrong, please pardon. I suspect I am. But was this comment edited by Claude? I ask specifically because it is well written, substantive, all which is expected here, but the "push back" part, to me, must be a) an artifact of Claude, either by osmotic assimilation (Which is happening to many innocent users) or b) Claude itself. Feel free to flag this comment if I get an answer. I do want to know.

No Claude was not involved in any way in me writing it, and honestly it's kind of getting depressing how many comments are constantly questioning peoples use of LLMs.

Yeah, that's why I invited the flag. But do not overlook how fucking depressing the endless LLM generated comments actually are too.

My apologies, and I do appreciate your reply.

Re: Computation as a universal and fundamental concept

#12

Post by helterskelter »

Maxatar wrote: post #7
eth0up wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I am wrong, please pardon. I suspect I am. But was this comment edited by Claude? I ask specifically because it is well written, substantive, all which is expected here, but the "push back" part, to me, must be a) an artifact of Claude, either by osmotic assimilation (Which is happening to many innocent users) or b) Claude itself. Feel free to flag this comment if I get an answer. I do want to know.

No Claude was not involved in any way in me writing it, and honestly it's kind of getting depressing how many comments are constantly questioning peoples use of LLMs.

Just a heads up, "I want to push back on" is an idiom Claude frequently uses.

It is depressing though, writing feels like it's in part becoming a game of outpacing the latest LLM's idiosyncrasies so we can signal authenticity, which perversely, is achieved through using an LLM enough so that you can become familiar with its flavor of communication.

Re: Computation as a universal and fundamental concept

#13

Post by sgt101 »

gradys wrote: post #4
sgt101 wrote: post #2

Computation has turned out to be a far more general concept than I think was imagined, up to the point that many computer scientists now seem to equate computation with the functioning of the universe. Recently it's been shown that there are real, physical processes which are undecidable (we cannot know if a latice of atoms has a spectral gap or not, we cannot determine if a specific particle in a fluid flow will rea…

It can be the case that both: - The physics of the universe can be completely modeled as computation, and - It's possible to pose undecidable problems about the way the universe unfolds This is intrinsic to the idea of undecidability even for Turing machines, e.g. "we equate computation with the functioning of Turing machines, but there are real processes executable in Turing machines that are undecidable".

Of course, if our universe is undecidable it must be the case that computable processes can be executed within it, and it might be the case that all of the processes that are ever executed within it are computable... but it might be that some of the processes that are executed are not computable... because the machine may.. or may not?

Re: Computation as a universal and fundamental concept

#14

Post by sgt101 »

Maxatar wrote: post #5
sgt101 wrote: post #2

Computation has turned out to be a far more general concept than I think was imagined, up to the point that many computer scientists now seem to equate computation with the functioning of the universe. Recently it's been shown that there are real, physical processes which are undecidable (we cannot know if a latice of atoms has a spectral gap or not, we cannot determine if a specific particle in a fluid flow will rea…

>Recently it's been shown that there are real, physical processes which are undecidable I want to push back a bit on this claim along two dimensions. Imagine a physical Turing machine built out of atoms, gears, levers, and an electron parked on the read/write head and ask whether that electron ever crosses some fixed plane in space, which it does only when the machine enters its halt configuration. That's now a purel…

I may have been making this claim, I need to think about this for a while and re read what you have written.

This is very helpful though, thank you.

Re: Computation as a universal and fundamental concept

#15

Post by jojogeo »

helterskelter wrote: post #12
Maxatar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Claude was not involved in any way in me writing it, and honestly it's kind of getting depressing how many comments are constantly questioning peoples use of LLMs.

Just a heads up, "I want to push back on" is an idiom Claude frequently uses. It is depressing though, writing feels like it's in part becoming a game of outpacing the latest LLM's idiosyncrasies so we can signal authenticity, which perversely, is achieved through using an LLM enough so that you can become familiar with its flavor of communication.

This is what makes me sad about the AI age; many articles now have the same phrasing, the same analogies, the same quips, structure, the same wording; once you start to see it there's no going back.

I actually laughed quite a lot to begin with, GPT models saying things like "...might look like P, but is NP wearing a hat and a lab coat..." and "...is a haunted house disguised as a git repository..."; but alas when you've heard them a million times everywhere it really starts to bite.

Re: Computation as a universal and fundamental concept

#16

Post by makerofthings »

jojogeo wrote: post #9

Something has always nagged me about the halting problem, might be my mis-understanding of the problem space but; - You have a piece of software - That software does in memory compute only - The software does not touch any peripherals, networking, or any other external source which introduce unpredictability (x) I'm convinced that somehow this can be solved/proven whether the execution will halt or not. (x) The secon…

Imagine a program that generates the digits of pi, one after the other and stops when it is finished. A general purpose program analysing this program to decide if it stops or not would have to know about pi. And about every other possible algorithm.

Re: Computation as a universal and fundamental concept

#17

Post by tromp »

jojogeo wrote: post #9

Something has always nagged me about the halting problem, might be my mis-understanding of the problem space but; - You have a piece of software - That software does in memory compute only - The software does not touch any peripherals, networking, or any other external source which introduce unpredictability (x) I'm convinced that somehow this can be solved/proven whether the execution will halt or not. (x) The secon…

It can be solved if the memory is bounded. But unbounded memory comes with undecidable problems.

Re: Computation as a universal and fundamental concept

#19

Post by jojogeo »

makerofthings wrote: post #16
jojogeo wrote: post #9

Something has always nagged me about the halting problem, might be my mis-understanding of the problem space but; - You have a piece of software - That software does in memory compute only - The software does not touch any peripherals, networking, or any other external source which introduce unpredictability (x) I'm convinced that somehow this can be solved/proven whether the execution will halt or not. (x) The secon…

Imagine a program that generates the digits of pi, one after the other and stops when it is finished. A general purpose program analysing this program to decide if it stops or not would have to know about pi. And about every other possible algorithm.

This is a brilliant explanation thank you.

Re: Computation as a universal and fundamental concept

#20

Post by docfort »

jojogeo wrote: post #9

Something has always nagged me about the halting problem, might be my mis-understanding of the problem space but; - You have a piece of software - That software does in memory compute only - The software does not touch any peripherals, networking, or any other external source which introduce unpredictability (x) I'm convinced that somehow this can be solved/proven whether the execution will halt or not. (x) The secon…

Related: the Busy Beaver problem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40857041
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