OrphanWilde comments on Can somebody explain this to me?: The computability of the laws of physics and hypercomputation - Less Wrong

12 Post author: ChrisHallquist 21 April 2013 09:22PM

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Comment author: OrphanWilde 23 April 2013 02:01:14PM -1 points [-]

Thank you.

I seriously disagree, incidentally. For example, it has some pretty specific assumptions about instantiation - it will be the sort of computer they had seventy some odd years ago. Because the single pool of memory, the single processor, the scan-one mechanism of traversal, all of these are assumptions which have serious effects on the very field the mathematical model was devised to consider, computability.

(And I can point out one good reason to doubt the Church-Turing thesis. A Turing machine is incapable of replicating the nondeterministic behavior of concurrent processing. I've never yet seen a process which depended on this nondeterminism, but it is nonetheless possible to devise one. Maybe to generate random numbers, I'm not sure.)