On Nov 24, 2008, at 5:26 PM, Brent Meeker wrote:
> Kory Heath wrote:
>> On Nov 23, 2008, at 11:24 AM, Brent Meeker wrote:
>>> Kory Heath wrote:
>>>> 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?
>>
>> Please see my recent response to Bruno. If we perform a complex
>> computation which results in placing the integer "5" into some memory
>> variable, and then later we copy the contents of that memory variable
>> to some other location in memory, in what sense are we re-performing
>> the original complex computation?
>
> That's different since, ex hypothesi, the original calculation was
> complex. So
> we can say just putting the answer, 5, in a register is not
> repeating the
> calculation based on some complexity measure of the process.
But the Conway's Life calculations are "complex" in the sense that I
meant the term. If we have a grid of cells filled with a pattern of
bits, and we point at one particular cell and ask, "If we iterate the
Conway's Life rule on this grid a trillion times, will this bit be on
or off?", we have to perform a bunch of computations to answer the
question. If we store the results of those computations, and then
later someone points at that same cell and asks the same question, and
I just look up the answer, I don't see how we can say that that act of
looking up the answer counts as re-performing the original
computation. Are you arguing that it does?
-- Kory
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list.domain.name.hidden
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe.domain.name.hidden
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Received on Mon Nov 24 2008 - 23:13:20 PST