DAE@C.CS.CMU.EDU (David A. Evans) (09/28/86)
PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM ANNOUNCEMENT:
COMPUTERS ARE NOT OMNIPOTENT
David Harel
Weizmann Institute
and
Carnegie Mellon University
Monday, October 6 4:00 p.m.
Porter Hall 223D
In April, 1984, TIME magazine quoted a computer professional as saying:
"Put the right kind of sofware into a computer and it will do
whatever you want it to. There may be limits on what you can
do with the machines themselves, but there are no limits on
what you can do with the software."
In the talk we shall disprove this contention outright, by exhibiting a
wide array of results obtained by mathematicians and computer scientists
between 1935 and 1983. Since the results point to inherent limitations of
any kind of computing device, even with unlimited resources, they appear
to have interesting philosophical implications concerning our own
limitations as entities with finite mass.