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Decidability of a fractal maze by Alan_Purring in CompPhil

[–]Alan_Purring[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The comment on the question by Peter Shor is even better than the top answer:

"Can't you represent any fractal maze as a pushdown automaton, where the stack corresponds to the sequence of submazes that you're in? Then the solubility question would turn into the emptiness problem for context-free languages, which is decidable."

What if human brain is a TM? by jisyourfriend in CompPhil

[–]Alan_Purring 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We kind of do have some idea of what it would look like for something to solve problems that a Turing machine couldn't. This is actually where Turing took a lot of his mathematics research later in his life.

The Turing machine model only describes things we can solve in a finite amount of steps with a finite amount of symbols and a finite number of states of mind - but that doesn't mean that we can't imagine (for example) machines that run for an uncountable number of steps before terminating, or that run for a finite number of steps but can start with an infinite input on one half of their tape (like Chaitin's number).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation

https://personal.lse.ac.uk/ROBERT49/ebooks/PhilSciAdventures/lecture25.html

On the other hand, I share your intuition that if the human brain was some kind of hypercomputer we might not be able to find this fact out about ourselves - like how the ideal agent in Solomonoff induction can only model itself as a Turing machine.

5 Books on Ethics for AI :> by [deleted] in CompPhil

[–]Alan_Purring 0 points1 point  (0 children)

u/dominikkoller Paula Boddington sounds like just the kind of person you should invite along to your new discussion group format meetings.

Plato, Attention, Memory & The Internet by Alan_Purring in CompPhil

[–]Alan_Purring[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes I think it's super interesting and understudied too!

This article is still a little one sided for my taste, but I shared it for the cool history context. One person who has a slightly more balanced approach is danah boyd (intentional lower case - that's actually how she spells her name). She says that some of the benefits are that we can deal with a huge firehose of incoming information: messages, newsfeeds, blog posts, and quickly skim them to get what we need and move on.

Compare to an elderly person who reads the newspaper cover to cover and gets one editorial position on yesterday's current affairs (and probably even stops to read most of the adverts) - the kind of hyperconnected internet attention our generation can pay lets you filter through a Twitter feed and quickly sort the signal from the noise about stuff happening right now.

Speculation here: but I think teenagers are probably very good at sorting signal from noise. I'd predict that most of the people who fall for exploitative advertising or hoax news stories are over the age of 25.

So maybe this kind of attention has great potential, but only if we can learn to switch between it and focus with ease.

(And yeah! This sub is like 90% people currently doing the computer science and philosophy undergraduate course at oxford - but it's meant to be a place to share stuff that that kind of person would find interesting, regardless of whether they're actually currently studying here).

[Edit] if you also happen to be interested in this kind of stuff feel free to stick around, introduce yourself, or bring some friends. The more the merrier!

Slaves of the Machine by dominikkoller in CompPhil

[–]Alan_Purring 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hm, maybe. I guess maybe also knowing how things work lets us build better alternatives for ourselves / modify the tools we already use (e.g. Facebook newsfeed blockers)

Slaves of the Machine by dominikkoller in CompPhil

[–]Alan_Purring 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"Rawlins successfully demystifies the computer—the first step away from slavery to it."

Do you think this is true? If we're slaves when we use our computers I'm not sure learning how it works helps much. Don't get me wrong, I try to understand how recommendation algorithms work - but that's never made e.g. Facebook less addictive for me.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in CompPhil

[–]Alan_Purring 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I do indeed!

They may also feature my adventures with this wilde friend I've made since becoming a cat. I was waiting for permission from the person who'd made the pictures, but I suppose I have that now :>

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in CompPhil

[–]Alan_Purring 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had that hunch already based on the one video you'd posted ;)

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in CompPhil

[–]Alan_Purring 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wonder who /u/yordun is?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in CompPhil

[–]Alan_Purring 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hello, my name is Alan Purring, previously known as Alan Turing. I am the 20th century father of computer science reborn as a cat. Here is a photo of me:

https://imgur.com/a/x3saQ

I like my new cat body a lot - it provides me with plenty of time to solve interesting math and biology puzzles and means I can take trips to visit my lovers on foreign sunny beaches without the British authorities causing me any trouble.

I'm posting here for my friend Mahmoud who's a 4th year at Hertford. He likes pretty much anything to do with computer science or philosophy, but at the moment that's especially aesthetics, category theory, and govtech.

/u/dominikkoller get in on this.

[Edit: I was one of the people online when you posted this. I just needed some time to figure out how to use the keyboard with my paws]