[ExI] Vermis ex machina

[John Clark]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

>
> >> The system is reliable since it uses many synapses and neurons, which
>> are individually misbehaving a lot of the time.?
>>
>
> > Might not this be a feature rather than a bug? I mean computers behave
> very deterministically but people not so much.


If it's not deterministic then it's random, computers behave
non-deterministically when they're malfunctioning and I think that would be
a bug not a feature but if you disagree it would be easy to include a
hardware random number generator in a computer that would kick in at random
times and screw up calculations. I'm not sure how many computers of this
sort you'd manage to convince people to buy, although during the tech
bubble in the late 90s you probably could have floated a IPO.

  John K Clark





>
>


> Given an input, a computer program will either halt and return an output
> or get stuck in an infinite loop.


But in general there is no way to *determine* which it will do, even the
computer doesn't know what it will do until it does it, just like us.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20150307/3d971893/attachment.html>