Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: "Fred. Zwarts" <F.Zwarts@HetNet.nl>
Newsgroups: comp.theory
Subject: Re: What it would take... People to address my points with reasoning
 instead of rhetoric
Date: Wed, 14 May 2025 12:56:36 +0200
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Op 13.mei.2025 om 23:49 schreef olcott:
> On 5/13/2025 4:28 PM, Richard Heathfield wrote:
>> On 13/05/2025 22:16, olcott wrote:
>>> On 5/13/2025 12:06 PM, Richard Heathfield wrote:
>>>> On 13/05/2025 17:21, dbush wrote:
>>>>> On 5/13/2025 12:01 PM, olcott wrote:
>>>>
>>>> <snip>
>>>>
>>>>>> The actual reasoning why HHH is supposed to report
>>>>>> on the behavior of the direct execution of DD()
>>>>>> instead of the actual behavior that the finite
>>>>>> string of DD specifies:
>>>>>
>>>>> Quite simply, it's the behavior of the direct execution that we 
>>>>> want to know about.
>>>>
>>>> Why?
>>>>
>>>> DDD doesn't do anything interesting.
>>>>
>>>> If it were a universal halt decider we'd have a reason to care, 
>>>> because its very existence would overturn pretty much the whole of 
>>>> computability theory and enable us to clean up many of the unsolved 
>>>> problems of mathematics.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Sure and we could achieve the same thing by
>>> simply hard-coding the actual all-knowing
>>> mind of God into a formal system.
>>
>> No, we couldn't.
>>
>>> The question is not about any universal halt
>>> decider
>>
>> Yes, it is.
>>
>>> that must be literally all knowing.
>>
>> That sounds like hyperbole, but it's actually not far off. It could, 
>> at least, be used as an oracle; you'd just need to find a way to 
>> express your question as a YNA program.
>>
>>> It has always actually only been about things
>>> that could prevent consistently determining
>>> the halt status of conventional programs.
>>
>> No, it's all about demonstrating that some computational problems 
>> can't be solved. The whole halting thing is just a vehicle that can be 
>> used as an example of an undecidable computation.
>>
> 
> In cannot include things that humanity has no knowledge of
> such as the Goldbach's conjecture and the meaning of life.
> 
> The time is quickly coming when AI will be thousands-fold
> smarter than the smartest human. Such as AI might figure
> out the Goldbach's conjecture.
> 
>>>> But it /isn't/ a universal halt decider, so who (apart from Mr 
>>>> Olcott) gives a damn whether it stops? About the only reason I can 
>>>> think of for caring is to set Mr Olcott straight, but he has made it 
>>>> abundantly clear that he's unsettable straightable.
>>>>
>>>
>>> There is no time that we are ever going to directly
>>> encode omniscience into a computer program.
>>
>> Right.
>>
>>> The
>>> screwy idea of a universal halt decider that is
>>> literally ALL KNOWING is just a screwy idea.
>>
>> There's nothing screwy about proving that such a program can't be 
>> written.
>>
> 
> Requiring it to be ALL KNOWING was always a little nuts.
> Requiring it to get fooled on fewer and fewer inputs
> is the rational goal.
> 
> HHH does compute the mapping from its input
> finite string to the behavior that this finite
> string specifies and this includes HHH emulating
> itself emulating DDD.
No, HHH computes the wrong mapping by skipping the most important part 
of the input, the part that specifies the conditional abort. Due to a 
bug, HHH aborts before it sees that part of the specification of the input.