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arundelo comments on John Baez Interviews with Eliezer (Parts 2 and 3) - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: multifoliaterose 29 March 2011 05:36PM

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Comment author: arundelo 29 March 2011 07:35:55PM 1 point [-]

The hardware and the software. Think of a provably correct compiler.

The main relevant paragraph in this interview is the one in part 2 whose first sentence is "The catastrophic sort of error, the sort you can’t recover from, is an error in modifying your own source code."

Comment author: jimrandomh 29 March 2011 07:58:47PM 5 points [-]

Interesting fact: The recent paper Finding and Understanding Bugs in C Compilers found miscompilation bugs in all compilers tested except for one, CompCert, which was unique in that its optimizer was built on a machine-checked proof framework.

Comment author: Perplexed 29 March 2011 08:41:24PM 2 points [-]

Yes, but I don't see what relevance that paragraph has to his desire for 'determinism'. Unless he has somehow formed the impression that 'non-deterministic' means 'error-prone' or that it is impossible to formally prove correctness of non-deterministic algorithms. In fact, hardware designs are routinely proven correct (ironically, using modal logic) even though the hardware being vetted is massively non-deterministic internally.