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If the brain is like a computer, how do humans even solve the halting problem? Maybe it's because humans feel anxiety at the unproductive passing of time while
by narrator 3y ago
If the brain is like a computer, how do humans even solve the halting problem? Maybe it's because humans feel anxiety at the unproductive passing of time while computers will just do what they're doing forever.
- i2cmaster 3y agoHumans tend to communicate/write software in what are really sub languages. Often these sub languages are not recursive.
- IIAOPSW 3y agoNothing you think about consciously has higher thread priority than the stay-alive loop.
- ethanbond 3y agoThey don’t really. People have different thresholds for acceptable exploration costs and heuristics for approximating those costs (as well as the opportunity cost of alternative courses of action). IMO, in biological systems the explore vs exploit tradeoff is pretty analogous to the halting problem. There doesn’t seem to be an optimal general “solution” to it. Once an organism is very familiar with its environment it’ll approximate near-optimal trade offs, which would suggest it’s just using heuristics.
- School-Cotton 3y agoHumans can’t solve the halting problem any more than computers can. For example, it’s trivial to write a program that searches by brute force for a cycle that would disprove the Collatz conjecture, and halts if it finds one. No human knows whether that program will halt.
- jameshart 3y agoHumans can’t solve the halting problem. Write a program that, for a positive integer, runs the Collatz process on it (if even: halve it; if odd, multiply by three and add one; repeat). If the process results in a 1, move on to the next number and repeat. If the process produces a number it produced previously, halt. (Worried you’ll need unbounded state for this part? Use tortoise+hare, it’s fine). This program halts if and only if the Collatz conjecture is false. Now, the Collatz conjecture might not be unprovable. But for now no human can tell you whether or not that program halts.
- genewitch 3y agoWhen I read about collatz I wrote a C# program that short circuits the calculation like that, but my programming chops are not great and it could only handle 3000 digits of memory serves. It's somewhere on my GitHub page and I'm curious how many other people released similar code to speed things up. I ended up using it to compare single core performance on any windows machine, because the timestamped logging was deterministic. Rewrote it in python and still use it these days.
- pjerem 3y ago> If the brain is like a computer That’s a common misconception. The brain is not like a computer. The brain can’t store and execute programs.
- kaba0 3y agoThe halting problem is about computable functions. Every real thing can at most solve computable functions — so for all practical purposes, a brain is a computer that has all the same limits.
- shkkmo 3y ago> That’s a common misconception. The brain is not like a computer. The brain can’t store and execute programs. Can't it? The brain is absolutely capable of emulating a turing complete system such as running a program.
- pjerem 3y agoCan it ? I mean, sure you can reason about a portion of code on your screen but there is no way you could emulate anything without some visual support. There is no way your short term memory could store the program and the variables. The human brain can barely remember 5 to 10 words for several seconds and you have no control on your long term memory. So yes your brain can somehow emulate a computer if you give him a pen, a sheet of paper paper, time, and a lot of sugar. But that’s not because it’s functioning like a computer but rather because you learnt how a computer work.