Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
Anyone want to explain this to me? Is it even possible to explain?
user-inactivated · 3437 days ago · link ·
They gave a difficult constructive proof of a statement there's an easy existence proof for. The post argues this is interesting because knowing how big a Turing machine you need before you have to worry about incompleteness gives you an idea where the boundary between nice, safe, well-behaved computations and the twilight zone is. I'm not sure I buy that, from a theoretical perspective the existence proof is all you need, and from a pragmatic perspective the point where you're not going to bother trying to prove properties of your programs comes long before the point where you can't prove properties of your programs.