3 ms·
Use a time machine to prove/disprove P == NP Hold up. P==NP is only proved if you have a time machine.[1] It's still unknown in story if you can do it with a c
by sbierwagen 16y ago
Use a time machine to prove/disprove P == NP
Hold up. P==NP is only proved if you have a time machine.[1] It's still unknown in story if you can do it with a conventional, causal, turing machine.
Also note that Harry is either ahead of the times (he doesn't mention the Moravec paper in-story) or very, very au courant, being perhaps the only eleven year old in the world to be reading preprints of theoretical computer science papers while also attending wizarding school.
1: http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1991/TempComp.html http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.artic...
- Eliezer 16y agoActually, it happens to be true that all eleven-year-olds attending wizarding school read preprints of theoretical computer science papers.
- demallien 16y ago<snicker>. Though your statement does feel a bit like dereferencing a NULL-pointer, as in GetAllElevenYearOldsAtWizardingSchool()->doesReadTheoreticalCompSciPapers() should blow up... (Well, at least in the world of bare-metal C, any sane language will of course return an empty collection, and not a NULL pointer to the first function....)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- tel 16y agoThen you did a very unrealistic job representing each and every other young wizard in your writing.
- gwern 16y agoYou're missing Eliezer's little joke. In classical logic, usually any predicate is True of a non-existent entity. There are no 11 year olds who attend wizarding school, hence it is True that all such creatures read CS preprints. (Like it is True that unicorns have one horn.)
- tel 16y agoI was also joking in that in Eliezer's fictional work he writes prolifically about 11 year olds who attend wizarding school and there is precisely one who reads them. Perhaps a </joke> would have been necessary.