5 ms·
No, nothing special about N++ (well, lookahead, but many regex engines have that). Repeated Search+Replace is the key, and not part of regex.
by detaro 5y ago
No, nothing special about N++ (well, lookahead, but many regex engines have that). Repeated Search+Replace is the key, and not part of regex.
- vermilingua 5y agoAaah of course, thanks
- dspillett 5y agoI find myself wondering if anyone has done a proper analysis to prove that human activity is Turing complete!
- vidarh 5y agoWe can manually execute the steps of a Turing machine. That's all that's needed.
- dTal 5y agoIt is so, trivially; humans wrote the find/replace box in Notepad++.
- teawrecks 5y agoI mean, I can write a FSM that outputs the code for find/replace in Notepad++.
- sudosysgen 5y agoYeah, but you can't write an FSM that can execute itself repeatedly over its own output indefinitely!
- tartoran 5y agoWe are guaranteed to halt, e.g lifespan. After death cells enter apoptosis stage where cells do final stages upon shutting down. I’d say it appears we are Turing complete, or at least it appears so from this angle
- thehappypm 5y agoHow about a human population?
- tartoran 5y agoOh, that too though we’re looking at it from a different angle. Most species so far have gone extinct though we’re a special kind, we may as well cause that without any external factors.
- skykooler 5y agoGiven that Turing machines cannot be guaranteed to halt (and it's trivial to write an infinitely-running Turing machine), therefore humans are not, technically, Turing-complete.
- chhickman 5y agoWell, I would say that any physical implementation of a Turing machine will eventually halt because you cannot guarantee an infinite energy supply. So if we're willing to ignore physical limitations then humans can be Turing complete - if not, then no machine be either.
- walnutclosefarm 5y agoTuring completeness is a theoretical construct that ignores that errors in execution inevitably occur during a sufficiently long program, due to the second law of thermodynamics (entropy must increase in a closed system). Any realization of a Turing complete engine eventually fails. That's different than halting, though, because it doesn't answer the question as to whether the program of the machine eventually reaches a halt instruction, when properly executed.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- assbuttbuttass 5y agoTuring's original idea of a "computer" was a human manipulating symbols on paper, so I would say trivially yes
- lupire 5y agoSo, Notepad++ basic interface is Turing complete because it's a place you can write a Turing machine and execute it.
- lifthrasiir 5y agoAnd if you allow multiple pattern-replacement pairs, you don't even need regex (the pattern can be a single fixed string) as it is enough to simulate semi-Thue systems [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Thue_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Thue_system