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Jack comments on A sealed prediction - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: Quirinus_Quirrell 28 January 2011 04:10AM

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Comment author: Jack 28 January 2011 06:36:02AM *  0 points [-]

Hmmmm. I thought the outcome of that experiment was more ambiguous than that- didn't his attempt return a cryptic "Don't mess with time travel"?

Comment author: wedrifid 28 January 2011 08:33:09AM 10 points [-]

Which, while it is cryptic, certainly gives us a strong indication about the expected success of time-travel computation.

(Without MoRverse) It reminds us to consider the implications of physics and the evident time travel mechanism. At the simplest level we can ask ourselves "What is more likely? We derive the right result or we get eaten by a black swan while trying?"

A consideration to make with respect to Harry's experiment in particular is that what we discovered was only that it is more likely for Harry to panic than for Harry to solve that particular computational task via that method. Not enough to rule out some degree of shortcut taking but certainly enough to be rather careful when taking it to the extremes of brute force decryption.

Comment author: orthonormal 29 January 2011 11:55:32PM 1 point [-]

An excellent point.