[bitwize]

Last time I was at UMass Amherst it was Bong Day or something, and people were out blithely blazing up on the lawn of the university square.

Fittingly, this article reads like a stoner's ramblings. It doesn't get into what exactly a "Super-Turing" machine is capable of that a Turing machine is not. Some googling turned up some theoretical possibilities (oracles and such) which do not appear to be physically buildable.

[Rickasaurus]

Just because Psychology and Philosophy majors bring in most of the school's money doesn't mean the Comp-Sci dept isn't fantastic.

According to Google, it's third in the country. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/rank.html

[Locke1689]

That's the worst ranking that I can possibly think of. It doesn't even use Google Scholar, which may introduce an interesting metric, like cited papers from universities.

Also, how do people not know this already? The results number in Google is wrong. It's just an inaccurate estimate designed to give people the "wow" factor when you search in Google.

[Rickasaurus]

By all other measures it's still a very good school for Comp-Sci, especially considering that it's a public university with somewhat reasonable tuition. Also, while the general acceptance rate is high, you do need a 3.5 GPA to get into the Comp-Sci program.

For example, take a look this publication based ranking: http://www.urch.com/forums/computer-science-admissions/79645...

[Locke1689]

Oh, I'm not disputing that Amherst is a good school, just pointing out that that metric is a stupid way to rank schools.

[scott_s]

All of her publications are available on her webpage, except this latest one, which I assume is the subject of the press release: http://binds.cs.umass.edu/publications.html

[eli_gottlieb]

Last time I was at UMass Amherst it was Bong Day or something, and people were out blithely blazing up on the lawn of the university square.

Must have been some years ago, then, because Extravaganja has been held in Amherst town for a long while now.

[bunderbunder]

It doesn't get into what exactly a "Super-Turing" machine is capable of that a Turing machine is not.

I'm not great at interpreting technobabble, but I think it means everything in NP-Hard is now solvable in linear time.

Or something.

[aqme28]

That isn't right. Super-Turing just means that it has capabilities a classical Turing machine does not[1], which is why this article is so terrible. What are these extra capabilities it does and how does it do them?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation

[bunderbunder]

Yeah, that's what I was trying to poke fun at. Me bad at jokes, apparently.

[bitwize]

No, stronger. It means the Halting Problem can be solved. Time to break out the bubbly! Or not.

The more I look into it, the more this Super-Turing business sounds like the computability-theory version of FTL neutrinos. According to Martin Davis, Siegelmann's paper involves neural nets with arbitrary real-numbered (as opposed to integer or rational) weights being able to recognize languages on the alphabet {a,b} that a Turing machine can't.

So you have this thing that can get uncomputable results because it's given uncomputable inputs! In other words, no more interesting, or practical, than attempting to do computation with the n-body problem, and almost certainly nothing we can actually build.