Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by schoen 3090 days ago
It's a little funny that mankind gets to use a full-fledged infinite-tape Turing machine in order to compute arbitrarily large computations, since no such machine would fit in our universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcomputational_problem

1 comments

The description of a Turing machine that can do arbitrarily large computations can be finite. See: Kolmogorov complexity.
Sure, but it feels a little funny in one way to say that people "know" all of its output, although I'd agree that for other purposes being able to write a program to generate something is a relatively good description of what it means to understand it.