MatthewB comments on Reason as memetic immune disorder - Less Wrong

215 Post author: PhilGoetz 19 September 2009 09:05PM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 19 September 2009 11:55:42PM *  10 points [-]

He claims to have an argument that P=NP. He's a philosopher, so "argument" != proof. Although approaching P=NP as a philosophical argument does strike me as kooky.

Better proof of kookhood is that he was at AGI mainly to present his work on hypercomputing, which he claimed was a computational system with more power than a Turing machine. One element of his argument was that proofs using hyperset logic (which he said is an entire field of logic nowadays; I wouldn't know) use a notation that can not even theoretically be represented by a Turing machine. These proofs were published in two-dimensional journal articles, in black-and-white print. I did not notice any fractal fonts in the proofs.

Comment author: billswift 20 September 2009 02:25:44AM 0 points [-]

I came across a wikipedia article on hypercomputing a while back, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation , the whole theory doesn't seem at all well supported to me.

Comment author: MatthewB 26 December 2009 03:21:47PM 0 points [-]

And, now I see why I am skeptical of hypercomputation. It seems to all necessitate some form of computation over an infinite number of steps. This would require some severe bending of the rules or constraints of physics, wouldn't it?

timtyler's comment below mine seems to be appropriate:

It is a field with an imaginary object of study.

Comment author: arfle 27 July 2010 12:53:06AM 0 points [-]

Doesn't Newtonian gravity require computation over an infinite number of steps?