Le 15-janv.-06, à 19:04, Benjamin Udell a écrit :
> The "dovetailer" keeps sounding like a powerful idea. I do remember
> that it has often been mentioned here, but somehow I failed to pick up
> a sense of what it was really about.
The Universal Dovetailer is a program which generates and executes all
programs.
Its existence is a non trivial consequence of Church thesis. Please
recall me to explain this in detail in one or two weeks.
The necessity to dovetail (that is to run successiveley on the initial
segement of the execution never waiting any programs stop is due to the
fact that the always defined programs cannot be generated mechanically
(this can be done in the case of all programs).
Actually I have already explain this on the list (in 2001) but the
escribe archive seems no more working again, and the new archive seems
not go enough backward in time.
The first published paper where I define it, is "Mechanism ans Personal
Identity" paper:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/M&PI_15-MAI-91.pdf
Russell Standish attributes it (wrongly) to Schmidhuber in his book. My
fault, perhaps, because I have (charitably) compare Schmidhuber "great
programmer" with the Universal Dovetailer in some message to James
Higgo. You can google on "universal dovetailer".
I have also introduced the distinction between the first person, plural
and non plural, and third person view, although this has been done by
some philosophers of mind in different context before. I introduce it
in the self-multiplication and UD context. This is explained in most of
my papers (recent or not).
Schmidhuber never accepted that distinction (or took it as unscientific
like may "scientist", but that is a category error). Actually he leaves
the list at the time most people acknowledge the idea. Schmidhuber's
work is more akin to a constructive physics based on Universal
effective prior than an attempt toward a TOE capable of treating the
mind-body relation problems. Here too with some imagination we can see
the shadow of that 1-3 distinction appearing in Tegmark through the
frog and bird view.
In the Quantum Mechanics setting the 1-3 distinction appears in Everett
fundamental paper under the term "subjective" and "objective".
The full conceptual power of the UD arises from the 1-3 distinction
applied to it. This leads easily to the mind/matter reversal (except
for the remaining "movie-graph/Occam difficulty).
Of course "dovetailing algorithm" are well known by computer scientists
as a way to simulate parallelism on a sequential computer.
> Was there a message to the Everything-List in which it was explained
> so that non-experts can understand it? I'm not asking you to track
> that message (or series of messages) down, but if you or somebody
> remembers around which month it was, that should be enough for me to
> find it. Or is there a link to a Webpage with such an exposition?
I have a lot in my web pages but the Everything Archive does not
function properly. I will try to find my own backup, once I have more
time.
But now, Ben, it could be an opportunity and a pleasure for me to
explain the UD and the UDA, again. (Those who have already understand
are not obliged to reread the explanations but actually not many people
have acknowledge a complete understanding of it).
After all, the interview with the lobian machine will bear on the UDA.
The UDA explains why physics is reduce to a measure on computations
"seen from some 1-point-of-view", and the lobian machine will be able
to extract the logic of probability one. This is enough to make the
comparison with quantum logic (the logic of probability one in
physics).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Mon Jan 16 2006 - 10:57:32 PST