• leonardo_arachoo@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Given that humans can write computer programs, how can you argue that the undecidability of the halting problem stops intelligent agents from being able to write computer programs?

    I don’t understand what you mean about the borrow checker in Rust or block instruction reordering. These are certainly not attempts at AI or AGI.

    What exactly does AGI mean to you?

    This stuff should all be obvious, but here we are.

    This is not necessary. Please don’t reply if you can’t resist the temptation to call people who disagree with you stupid.

    • fiasco@possumpat.ioEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      This is proof of one thing: that our brains are nothing like digital computers as laid out by Turing and Church.

      What I mean about compilers is, compiler optimizations are only valid if a particular bit of code rewriting does exactly the same thing under all conditions as what the human wrote. This is chiefly only possible if the code in question doesn’t include any branches (if, loops, function calls). A section of code with no branches is called a basic block. Rust is special because it harshly constrains the kinds of programs you can write: another consequence of the halting problem is that, in general, you can’t track pointer aliasing outside a basic block, but the Rust program constraints do make this possible. It just foists the intellectual load onto the programmer. This is also why Rust is far and away my favorite language; I respect the boldness of this play, and the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.

      To me, general AI means a computer program having at least the same capabilities as a human. You can go further down this rabbit hole and read about the question that spawned the halting problem, called the entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) to see that AI is actually more impossible than I let on.

      • leonardo_arachoo@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Here are two groups of claims I disagree with that I think you must agree with

        1 - brains do things that a computer program can never do. It is impossible for a computer to ever simulate the computation* done by a brain. Humans solve the halting problem by doing something a computer could never do.

        2 - It is necessary to solve the halting problem to write computer programs. Humans can only write computer programs because they solve the halting problem first.

        *perhaps you will prefer a different word here

        I would say that:

        • it doesn’t require solving any halting problems to write computer programs
        • there is no general solution to the halting problem that works on human brains but not on computers.
        • computers can in principle simulate brains with enough accuracy to simulate any computation happening on a brain. However, there would be far cheaper ways to do any computation.

        Which of my statements do you disagree with?