🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ebfl02Ef76Hs01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> kp@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) writes:
|What makes the multi-body problem a counter-example is not just the fact
|that the problem has no closed-form solution, but the chaotic nature of
|the mechanical system.
|
|In a chaotic system, an arbitrarily small change in initial conditions
|will over time produce an arbitrarily *large* difference in subsequent
|states. [...]
|That was a rough sketch of a proof that not all causal systems can be
|modeled by programs.  Let me add a plausibility argument, so
|that the claim will not seem counter-intuitive.
|
|What makes the analog causal system different from the algorithm is that
|each state of the analog system encodes an infinite amount of information.

Real intelligent systems (e.g. humans) function quite successfully
at a finite temperature despite the influence of thermal
fluctuations (Brownian motion), which cause finite random perturbations
of everything.  A finite system embedded in a thermal environment
cannot encode an infinite amount of information.

This would seem to indicate that your argument has no bearing on
what may be necessary for intelligence, at least over a time-scale
short enough that the physical embodiment of the intelligence is
not disrupted by thermal fluctuations, whether or not these are
chaotically amplified.

-David West      dhw@iti.org