Re: Toby’s “Regardless of the actual computational limits of our universe, I have no doubt that the study of hypercomputation will lead to many important theoretical results across computer science, philosophy, mathematics and physics.”
Hmm. What have we got so far out of Omegas and Oracles? I expect what we will get out of Hypercomputation will be mostly confusion—since it sounds as though it is a field with a real object of study.
Well, one practical result we’ve got is that we shouldn’t program AIs to assume (either implicitly or explicitly) that the universe must be computable. See this discussion between Eliezer and me about this.
Re: Toby’s “Regardless of the actual computational limits of our universe, I have no doubt that the study of hypercomputation will lead to many important theoretical results across computer science, philosophy, mathematics and physics.”
Hmm. What have we got so far out of Omegas and Oracles? I expect what we will get out of Hypercomputation will be mostly confusion—since it sounds as though it is a field with a real object of study.
Well, one practical result we’ve got is that we shouldn’t program AIs to assume (either implicitly or explicitly) that the universe must be computable. See this discussion between Eliezer and me about this.
Making agents with assumptions about anything which we are not confident of the truth of seems like a dubious strategy.
We are fairly confident of the Church-Turing thesis, though: “Today the thesis has near-universal acceptance” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church–Turing_thesis