From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Tue Sep 07 1999 - 03:57:21 MDT
In a message dated 09/07/1999 4:40:50 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
mjg223@nyu.edu writes:
> There aren’t, of course, any constraints on the kind
> of universe we can imagine, but infinite processing speed is pretty far out
> there. For instance, you could solve the halting problem with an
infinitely
> fast
> computer: Simulate a Turing machine, feed it the query program, and if it
> doesn’
> t halt instantly then it never will. This makes all kinds of peculiar
things
> possible, like deriving ‘perfect’ concepts from data – that is finding the
> computational, productive pattern ideally matching a data set, at once
> minimizing over specialization and over generalization, a feat which is
> impossible (non-heuristically) in our universe.
Tachyons, man we got tachyons and lots of them!
>The infinite speed requirement is avoidable: we could be getting one tick
every
>trillion, trillion real years and never be any the wiser. Infinite state is a
>equirement though, if the evolutionary chain is unbounded. As the size of the
>geometrically growing dataset being represented approaches infinity, the
cost to
>look up a piece of data becomes infinite. The total tree being simulated
remains
>finite at every point in time, but God would have to be exponentially
patient.
What about trana-finite computation vis vis higher physical dimensions? Kind
of like two recent books by Rudy Rucker (Saucer Wisdom) and Clifford
Pickover (Surfing Hyperspace). Because one physical dimension overlays
another, the distances between components and storage media is not an issue.
Sphere packing made easy.
Spud
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