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Re: Cool Math Lessons
Posted:
Feb 29, 2012 11:45 PM
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Kirby and I had an "exchange" on similar short time ago. I surely don't wish to go into "Kirby-speak" (thanks Haim) on this notion again but I certainly believe it to be an "information process". As such, I believe its limits can most probably be articulated and described by intellectual concepts such as the Church-Turing thesis, (though with a more open-ended concept of "information-process" as opposed to "algorithm" which has many incompatible definitions sometime of a fairly narrow scope). I say "most probably" because we don't currently have a robust definition of "information process" though we do have have several robust definitions of "computable function" (Church-Turing...)
When I talk about "information processes" I'm purposely echoing someone like Peter Denning and his "Great Principles of Computing" which are meant to cover both natural (e.g., DNA, brain processes) and comupter-based processing.
Going back to the Kirby argument for a moment, do you suppose the human brain can routinely and reliably violate known complexity (time) limits on computation, such as solving large traveling salesman problems or factoring large integers? I'm not assuming you do (as Kirby does) but its a convenient litmus test.
Joe N
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