zarnuk@caen.engin.umich.edu (Paul Steven Mccarthy) (03/16/90)
The contention that machines cannot achieve human-levels of sentience because they cannot calculate to infinite precision (ie store real numbers) is misleading. Machines _can_ store real numbers, you just have to represent them algebraically, not in binary. (By the way, how do people calculate with real numbers? :-) ---Paul...
utility@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Ronald BODKIN) (03/17/90)
In article <4938b347.1a4d7@cicada.engin.umich.edu> zarnuk@caen.engin.umich.edu (Paul Steven Mccarthy) writes: >The contention that machines cannot achieve human-levels of >sentience because they cannot calculate to infinite precision >(ie store real numbers) is misleading. I was never speaking of this. I was saying that they can not, even suitably idealized, store ALL real numbers -- with a countably infinite about of memory one cannot represent an uncountable number of things (even in sequence). This related to computing the universe, not to computing at human levels (I don't see there as any issue in this matter -- I guess one would call me a "reductionist" in that I think people CAN not be fundamentally different than machines -- both obey the laws of the universe). >Machines _can_ store real numbers, you just have to represent them >algebraically, not in binary. (By the way, how do people calculate >with real numbers? :-) Naturally machines can "store" real numbers like we do, but we can't write down the "bulk" of them either (i.e. it is possible to put those we can't write down into bijection will all reals). Ron