Are humans Turing Machines?
Jun. 25th, 2003 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guslI think so. It's almost required of believers in strong AI.
This afternoon, I had a colleague tell me that humans are superior to computers because we are not Turing machines, so we aren't subject to the halting problem. I told his arguments sounded a lot like Penrose's fallacious anti-strong-AI arguments.
We argued for about 10 minutes and then I gave up convincing him.
Crispin Cowan on the metaphysical implications of humans being Turing machines.
Boyer and Moore have a machine prove the Halting Problem
This afternoon, I had a colleague tell me that humans are superior to computers because we are not Turing machines, so we aren't subject to the halting problem. I told his arguments sounded a lot like Penrose's fallacious anti-strong-AI arguments.
We argued for about 10 minutes and then I gave up convincing him.
Crispin Cowan on the metaphysical implications of humans being Turing machines.
Boyer and Moore have a machine prove the Halting Problem
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Re: hmm
Date: 2003-06-26 11:05 pm (UTC)It was counterintuitive for me that we can't decide 0^m 1^m.
A Turing Machine with finite tape (or a PA with a finite stack) is just a DFA. It only has finite memory, and just like the computer program, we can "simulate" it with a DFA, each of whose states represents the complete state of the tape and the position of the head.
That's an insight I should have had back when I studied Theory of Computation, but for some reason I didn't (I don't think the prof showed it either). I guess I was just sick of the whole thing.