Normal_Anomaly comments on Tidbit: “Semantic over-achievers” - Less Wrong

6 Post author: kpreid 01 December 2011 03:49PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (27)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gwern 03 December 2011 03:09:54AM *  0 points [-]

You don't necessarily add restrictions to a language to stop it from being Turing-Complete, you can just not give it the necessary axioms or whatever. I mean, in a regular language, there's no rule saying 'you can use all these regexps and atoms unless you're using them like this, because that would be Turing-complete'.

For a human example, look at the reports about the Piraha language. It's not that they ban recursion out of superstitious dread of the infinite or something - it's apparently that they simply don't understand it/use it.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 03 December 2011 03:24:51AM 0 points [-]

That's very interesting. I thought that all human languages were "Turing-Complete" because otherwise they wouldn't be able to do everything they were used for.

Comment author: gwern 03 December 2011 03:30:37AM 0 points [-]

Humans don't compute unbounded loops in their spoken languages. :)