X-Message-Number: 12993
From: "John Clark" <>
Subject: creative computing
Date: Fri, 24 Dec 1999 11:26:06 -0500

 On  Thu, 23 Dec 1999 Wrote:

     >Anything that such a computer can do, a human mathematician can do
     >also, in principle--or could, if he lived long enough and had a very,
     >very large supply of pencils and paper


Anything that God can do, I can do also, in principle--or could, if I lived long
enough and had a very, very large supply of picks and shovels.


     >Do you believe that, if you write down the right successive sets of 
     numbers
     >on yellow foolscap, you will create living, feeling, thinking people?

Yes, but not because you were able to write them on yellow foolscap but because

you understood these virtual people in every detail, in fact you understood them
so well you could simulate them on a virtual computer also in your head.


      >We already know that a digital, serial computer does not work in real 
      time

Huh? What type of time does it work in if not real?

         >and cannot do more than one thing at a time.

You keep going on and on about the profound philosophical difference between

serial and parallel computers; I see no evidence it's anything but an 
engineering
consideration. At any rate the question is moot.


All future computers will be parallel, Blue Gene will have a million processors 
and
I'll bet that in 10 years or less we'll have a billion.

      >even the ORDER of events need not correspond, in the computer and the
      >real world, or the simulated world.

What's so strange about that? Haven't you ever thought about what you're going
to do next year and then thought about what you're going to do next week?

    >the computer to do calculations corresponding to events at a range of
    >future times. The results would of course be LABELED in the correct
    >order, but not developed in that order. Does this bother anybody?

Well .. my brain undoubtedly does things like that constantly and it hasn't
bothered me yet.

        John K Clark       

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