thomblake comments on Rationality Quotes - September 2009 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: thomblake 01 September 2009 03:06PM

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Comment author: thomblake 04 September 2009 12:34:47PM 0 points [-]

Consistency checking is NP-complete

That's a pretty strong claim. Is there a proof? Or did you just mean that consistency checking is in NP?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 04 September 2009 01:02:04PM 2 points [-]

That's a pretty strong claim. Is there a proof? Or did you just mean that consistency checking is in NP?

It's worse than that, consistency checking is undecidable. This is implied by Gödel's second incompleteness theorem.

Comment author: CronoDAS 04 September 2009 06:47:43PM *  1 point [-]

Well, 3-SAT is NP-complete, anyway. If consistency checking in mere propositional logic is already NP-complete, then it can't be any easier to do consistency checking to real-world arguments that require predicate logic or other, even more complicated systems to express.

Godel Escher Bach has a section that talks about this.