Kory Heath wrote:
> 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
>
No, I'm saying it doesn't.
Brent
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Received on Tue Nov 25 2008 - 00:19:39 PST