Re: A unique number for every "person" - can it be done?

From: infobahn (infobahn_at_btinternet.com)
Date: 03/18/05 

Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 06:42:55 +0000 (UTC)

spinoza1111@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> infobahn wrote:
> > spinoza1111@yahoo.com wrote:
> > >
> > > What I haven't seen is any theoretical work that proves that
> > > a quantum computer with nondenumerably infinite states or symbols
> can
> > > for example determine whether a TM will halt.
> >
> > If you are asking whether QC can solve the Halting Problem, it can't,
> > for precisely the same reason that a TM can't.
>
> Thought so. Confirmed it on Wikipedia on my lunch hour.

That should not have been necessary. The Halting Problem is one
of undecidability, not one of insufficient computing power. If
QC is even remotely usable, it constitutes a "sufficiently
powerful formal system", and therefore is hamstrung by Goedel's
theorem just as effectively as a more traditional computer model.

> But Big Science
> still perpetrates the oldest computing hoax, the subsitution of Speed
> for Truth,

I don't think so.

> because the Wiki article links to "hypercomputation".

Strange use of "because". Since when did a Wiki article define what
science is, does, or perpetrates?

> There might be something I am missing.

The possibility had occurred to me.

> Einstein famously told Nash,
> "you need to learn some physics". I know very little about quantum
> physics, or even Newtonian physics.

It might profit you to learn at least the basics of Newtonian
mechanics. On the other hand, it might not.

> But it also seems that the physicists don't know computer science
> insofar as they imply, or claim, that Church/Turing "might" be refuted
> in some sort of quantum hypercomputation carried out by some mad
> scientist in a bubbling vat.

It isn't necessary that they learn computer science to realise
that such a claim (if indeed it has been made by serious scientists)
is wrong. They need only learn a little mathematics.

<snip>

Relevant Pages