Will_Newsome comments on Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber - Less Wrong

35 Post author: gwern 02 September 2012 11:49PM

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Comment author: Will_Newsome 05 September 2012 12:46:25PM 8 points [-]

yo dawg we heard you like hyperbolic time chambers

Comment author: katydee 07 September 2012 10:14:05AM *  0 points [-]

Note: the above is actually a highly insightful comment if you stop and think about it for a second.

Comment author: thomblake 12 September 2012 01:38:15PM 4 points [-]

the above is actually a highly insightful comment if you stop and think about it for a second.

Any comment can seem insightful if you're allowed to supply details until it makes sense.

Comment author: katydee 12 September 2012 02:29:59PM 1 point [-]

I don't think the details you have to supply here (you have to know what the meme is, I suppose?) are particularly difficult or unreasonable.

Comment author: chaosmosis 12 September 2012 01:44:15PM 1 point [-]

afsd;ljkurjzvn,x

Comment author: chaosmosis 12 September 2012 01:48:01PM *  5 points [-]

The above comment would be insightful if it was a counterexample. This means it is not a counterexample. That means that it is not insightful. That means it is a counterexample. It's like the least interesting number paradox of nonsense strings of letters.

Regardless, I might recognize the technical accuracy of your point, but your point is only superficially useful. I liked the original comment and thought that it was both funny and insightful. Yes, some of that insight is mine as well, rocks can't sing or dance or use logic, but that doesn't mean that the initial comment isn't also interesting.

Comment author: thomblake 12 September 2012 02:50:16PM 4 points [-]

The above comment would be insightful if it was a counterexample. This means it is not a counterexample. That means that it is not insightful.

This does not follow. You're treating the first premise like a double implication, but it's certainly not true that the comment would be insightful if and only if it was a counterexample.

Clearly the comment "afsd;ljkurjzvn,x" was just a typo for "afsd:ljkurjzvn.x", which I read as agreement with my point, making clever reference to complexity theory and Aaronson's refutation of the waterfall argument.

Comment author: Rukifellth 14 April 2013 10:43:53PM 0 points [-]

So it's isn't rot13?

Comment author: CronoDAS 07 September 2012 10:39:17AM 2 points [-]

Indeed. Put a hyperbolic time chamber inside another hyperbolic time chamber, and you get a speedup factor of 365 squared.

I think the characters in Primer may have done something like this, getting around a limitation of their time machine by putting a second time machine inside of the first. Then again, the movie isn't always clear as to what's happening, so it's hard to tell...

Comment author: gwern 07 September 2012 05:25:20PM *  3 points [-]

Yeah, it would be interesting, but it's not doable in either the original DBZ scenario, or in upload scenarios: you can't emulate an emulator and get a speedup like that - the buckpassing doesn't work, the computations still have to be done somewhere.

(Any optimization you could apply to emulating an emulation, like some sort of Futamura projection collapsing the emulated program and the emulated hardware, could be done at the original emulation level, so all it leaves you with is possible programming convenience and constant factors of inefficiency and indirection.)