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by herval 1199 days ago
oh yes, the brain is a Turing Machine! Forgot that one too
2 comments
JoshCole 1197 days ago
No you didn’t? You mentioned that argument many times? You can’t talk about pesos, then dollars, then yen, but pretend you forgot to talk about money.
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Kim_Bruning 1199 days ago
Well it's definitely true that the human brain is Turing complete.

(Trivial approach: It seems fairly unlikely that Alan Turing would not have been able to simulate Turing machine inside his head. :-P )

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Maursault 1199 days ago
> Well it's definitely true that the human brain is Turing complete.

That is definitely false. "In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules... is said to be Turing-complete... if it can be used to simulate any Turing machine." [0] A Turing machine has infinite memory; the human brain does not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness

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Kim_Bruning 1199 days ago
Technically correct, as expected from HN.

Of course, the technically correct definition would limit the usefulness of the term to just the field of mathematics.

Colloquially, people also say that systems that are obviously finite (due to having to exist in the real world) are also Turing complete. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness#Non-mathem... (subsection of article you quoted)

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