Incorrect comments on GAZP vs. GLUT - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 April 2008 01:51AM

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Comment author: gwern 06 February 2012 11:20:14PM 0 points [-]

Ahemhem. Haskell is as fine a turing complete language; we just like to have our side effects explicit!

I don't think we even need turing-completeness, really. Take a total language, and give it a loop-timeout of say 3^^^^3. It can compute anything we care about, and is still guaranteed to terminate in bounded time.

(I'm reminded of Godel's letter discussing P=NP - should such an algorithm be found, mathematicians could be replaced by a machine that searches all proofs with less than a few million symbols; anything that couldn't be proved with that many symbols would be of little to no interest to us.)

Comment author: Incorrect 07 February 2012 03:37:22PM 0 points [-]

anything that couldn't be proved with that many symbols would be of little to no interest to us

Are you sure? Maybe there are exist concise, powerful theorems that have really long proofs.

Comment author: gwern 07 February 2012 03:39:40PM 4 points [-]

Oh good grief, since everyone here is intent on nitpicking the observation to death, here is his bloody letter: http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/the-gdel-letter/