X-Message-Number: 8567
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 1997 22:58:14 -0700 (PDT)
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: Digital Shakespeare
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On Sun, 07 Sep 1997 "John P. Pietrzak" <> Wrote:
>The algorithm I gave you will certainly _not_ terminate
So what, it's no great trick to dream up an endless loop. To repeat, the task
I gave you will terminate and is not impossible, I thinks it's difficult but
prove me wrong and tell me the trillionth digit of PI.
>And I do state, the process of following the steps in the algorithm
>is simple, something most every human on the planet can do.
You find it simple so do it and tell me the results, I tried to do it myself
but found it too complex, I guess that makes me a simpleton.
>It is possible for something to be both simple _and_ big.
You're right, or to put it more simply, it's now simply obvious to any
simpleton that the concept of "simplicity" is not all that simple.
>>Me:
>>I have no definition of "simplicity" or "complexity" just as I have
>>none for "intelligence" and for the same reason, these things are
>>best explained by example.
>Ah, you must have fun talking to people. :) (I can see it now: every
>time you come up to someone to talk to them, you spend hours training
>their neural net with examples so that your categories mesh with
>theirs, before you can get your point across.)
Actually when I talk to people I usually use words, but I've looked up very
few of those words in a dictionary because I didn't need too, and even when I
did it doesn't weaken my case because the lexicographers got the knowledge to
write their book the same way I did, from usage.
By itself a dictionary is nothing but one big circular definition. All the
definitions in a dictionary are made of words, and those words also have
definitions made of other words also in the dictionary, and round and round
we go. All definitions, IF that's the only information you had, would be
circular. A dictionary would just say that one squiggle is equal to another
squiggle and that squiggle is equal to yet another squiggle in the same book.
If you came from Mars you would not learn one thing about our world or the
humans who inhabit it from such a book. In the real Physical world
dictionaries are useful because there is a lot of information that all
readers have in common that is not in any book.
If I am frowning and have tears in my eyes and say "I am sad" then you don't
need any book to have some idea of what I'm feeling. If you then read that
"happy is the opposite of sad" then you understand in a deep way what "happy"
means, it is no longer just a squiggle, it is a symbol with meaning.
>The fact is, each and every digital processor simply flips switches
I agree (except perhaps for your word "simply") but what can you conclude
from that? Yes a switch is simple, but 2 switches are more complex than one
and 3 more complex than 2.
>attempt to parse these two strings (in English, please):
>a) To be or not to be, that is the question.
>b) poeyiupoaivbyrpoiewqiopzeuioprne8v23bvdfh
You don't have to convince me that Shakespeare is greater than gibberish and
even in some way more complex, what I'm saying is that I don't have a
mathematical definition of "complex" to go with my intuitive understanding of
the word and you don't either. I wish you did.
>Let's see here; from what I know about the man [Einstein], he lived
>to a relatively old age in a modern society. I believe he managed to
>get around from his house to his place of work sufficiently well; he
>managed to feed and clothe himself
I wasn't born yesterday, I just don't believe that when you think of Einstein
you first think of a man who was able to feed himself. Perhaps I should have
used Steven Hawking in my example because he can do none of the things your
list.
>and he managed to avoid being hit by cars,
Hawking was hit and rather badly injured when a car hit him recently.
>Indeed, I do use it [the word intelligent] often. Most of the time,
>I use it in a social context (i.e., people are intelligent when they
>do what I want them to do, they are unintelligent when they don't
>do what I want them to do -- in other words, the most common
>definition of the term).
Never heard of that one, a flim flam man could use the opposite idea,
but to each their own.
>When I'm trying to be precise, however, I need to be more careful
>about how I use the term, particularly when I'm trying to use it in
>an objective manner.
In other words one set of ideas is useful in everyday life and another set
is useful when arguing philosophy on Cryonet.
>Hey, now, waitaminnit, you never told me there was a limit on who
>the tester could be! Please, define for me exactly, who can and
>cannot be used as a tester for the Turing Test.
Obviously anybody can be a tester and equally obviously that will change the
results of the test, just as in real life. I thought we already both agreed
that The Turing Test was as subjective as a test that determined what was
interesting and what was not.
In #8556 Andre Robatino <> On Sun, 7 Sep 97 Wrote:
>because of nonzero decoherence, the quantum state ends up being
>changed slightly which means that for a given input there are more
>than one possible output with nonzero probability.
OK, I'll buy that, what stuck in my craw is when you said this means it has
an infinite number of internal states, in fact if there in no relationship
between input and output it becomes pretty pointless to talk about internal
states at all.
>>Me:
>>we can't measure the quantum wave function F(x) of a particle, we
>>can only measure the intensity of the wave function [F(x)]^2
>>because that's a probability and probability we can measure.
>True if you're doing a measurement of position, but a measurement of
>momentum involves taking partial derivatives of the wave function,
>so any change in the wave function other than a global phase factor
>leads to changes in the probabilities of measurements of various
>quantities.
I don't understand your distinction between position and momentum because it
makes no difference, the more certain you become about one the less certain
about the other. If you want to find the momentum of an individual photon,
hf, you can find it by using the formula hN/X , h is the Planck constant,
and N is the number of wave crests the photon makes over a distance X.
If we were to actually perform this experiment when we got near the end of
distance X it would not be entirely clear if we should include the last wave
crest or not. We could minimize this problem and get a more accurate
measurement of momentum by making X bigger, but then you'd know less about
the position of the photon, X, thus momentum and position have an inverse
relationship.
>Anyway, the change in the wave function due to decoherence _does_ in
>general affect the intensity, along with the phase.
I never said it didn't, what I said was that we can't measure the wave
function but we can measure it's intensity.
In #8552 On Sat, 06 Sep 1997 John de Rivaz <>
>I believe that there is now a relatively simple algorithm that will
>calculate the digits of PI from a given digit.
Yes, very recently a formula for PI was discovered that could find any digit
of Pi without calculating all the intervening numbers, but it doesn't work
for base 10, only base 16.
John K Clark
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