[jpcooper]

Carl Hewitt, the inventor of the actor model, wrote this paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3418003, which he posted a link to on a recent post here on Erlang.

In it, he claims that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is not true, and that the actor model is more general than the Turing machine. I am open to entertaining the idea.

I've seen that his ideas have been discredited elsewhere on HN. I would be interested to know people's opinions on this, as a lot of the paper went over my head.

[hilbertseries]

> he claims that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is not true, and that the actor model is more general than the Turing machine

He is certainly wrong about the incompleteness theorems. And it’s entirely possible to create a model of computation that is more general than Turings. The question is whether it better represents what’s computable, the abstract mentions computations involving an “infinite number of computations” between steps...

[jpcooper]

How is he wrong about GIT?

What more general systems of computation are there than Turing? Are any in use? Are they really more general?

The claims of the generality of Actors seem to rely on continuous time and non-determinism. Actors, determinism, non-determinism, concurrency and the completeness axiom are models which we can use to express computation and our surroundings, and nothing more.

One man says lambda, another says actor. Given our models of physics; given Planck and Heisenberg, are they really different? If so, how? Measure theory rests on the completeness axiom, but it is just a very useful axiom.

Am I missing something?

[macintux]

Dr. Hewitt often pops up to discuss Erlang and the actor model here, so you might have the opportunity to ask him for more details.