Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gertef 3358 days ago
The number you are paraphrasing cannot be precisely identified in finite time.
1 comments

Oh, you're right. For that I would need to explicit the construction of the sequence n0, n1, … but that's impossible : if I can find such sequence, my proof holds but at the same time such sequence shows that the set is countable => contradiction, hence there is no such sequence.

But well, now that we've proven that such sequence doesn't exist, we've proven that the given set is not countable !

Not the most elegant proof ever, but I think it works.

Actually it doesn't: what if the given sequence exists but cannot be expressed with words ? (This is exactly the same thing than «a real number that can't ne expressed with words» which is what I'm trying to demonstrate not to exist. I'm going nowhere)