Re: Immortality

From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Fri Dec 15 2000 - 12:45:38 MST


At 12:21 AM 12/15/2000 -0500, John K Clark wrote:

> You can't predict what a finite state machine will do.

More precisely, you can calculate the limits of predictability for finite
state machines, given any certain amount of memory to work with. All
finite state machines are predictable, but very complex ones may have high
predictive error rates on current hardware. With sufficient memory
("sufficient" being a miniscule fraction of the amount of memory required
to map the entire state space), one can predict what any finite state
machine will do with a fairly high degree of certainty.

-James Rogers
  jamesr@best.com



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