Kory Heath wrote:
>
> On Nov 22, 2008, at 1:10 PM, Brent Meeker wrote:
>> So why should it make a difference
>> whether those state changes are decided by gates in the cpu or a
>> huge look-up table?
>
> The difference is in the number of times that the relevant computation
> was physically implemented. When you query the lookup table to get a
> bit, you are not performing the computation again. You're just viewing
> the result of the computation you did earlier. It seems to me that
> this matters for Duplicationists, but maybe not for Unificationists.
>
> Or maybe I'm still misdiagnosing the problem. Is anyone arguing that,
> when you play back the lookup table like a movie, this counts as
> performing all of the Conway's Life computations a second time?
Why shouldn't it? Suppose your recording device uses a compression algorithm
and suppose the compression algorithm is so efficient the compressed recording
is no bigger than the Conway's Life program plus the initial state information.
Brent
>In
> that case there would be nothing problematic about this thought
> experiment for Duplicationists or Unificationists. But I don't see how
> playing back the lookup table can count as implementing the Conway's
> Life computations.
>
> -- Kory
>
>
> >
>
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Received on Sun Nov 23 2008 - 14:24:41 PST