Re: Implementation

From: Hans Moravec <hpm.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 22:12:28 -0400

hal.domain.name.hidden:
> My view is that it is possible that the isomorphism exists, but I am
> not convinced that it is guaranteed to exist. Much information is
> not recorded in the HLUT - emotional states, alternate answers which
> were considered and then rejected, etc. People have been known to
> keep secrets their entire lives. Is it guaranteed that every
> private thought of the original conscious program can be deduced by
> looking at its responses to all possible conversations? Maybe there
> are some programs so closemouthed that no conversation could cause
> them to reveal their secrets. In that case I don't see how any
> amount of study of the HLUT could reveal the full structure of the
> original program.

Operations in an alleged original program that don't affect I/O in any
possible case are just junk, functionally equivalent to null
operations. They don't play a role the isomorphism.

Compiler writers will tell you that computations that have no effect
at all on I/O behaviour can be optimized out.

Evolution would be similarly ruthless in deleting structures that have
no effect on behavior, except to uselessly consume metabolic
resources.


A bad programmer might have included nonsense loops in the original
program that did nothing but bloat its size and waste execution
time. A good programmer or compiler whould clean up such code,
leaving only the essentials to produce the proper I/O.

A program reverse-engineered from a HLT might resemble a
program written by a good programmer.

But, with or without junk code, all encodings of the same I/O
behavior are isomorphic.
Received on Tue Jul 27 1999 - 19:14:54 PDT