4 ms·
This reminds me of Godel's incompleteness theorem - which I'll poorly present as: Any system that is sufficiently complex and complete will contain legal assert
by brokentone 13y ago
This reminds me of Godel's incompleteness theorem - which I'll poorly present as: Any system that is sufficiently complex and complete will contain legal assertions that will disprove or destroy the system. (Those that do not are not complete).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_the...
http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567 http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/...
- kbd 13y ago> ... will contain legal assertions... Well, the comments state that to make this happen he had to "[exploit] a bug in the UTF-7 decoder". So, not legal assertions.
- brokentone 13y agoIt parses, thus it is legal.
- jerf 13y agoNeither throwing an exception nor having a perfectly-deterministic buggy behavior is what Godel was referring to. This shouldn't remind you of anything related to the incompleteness theorem, because it's completely unrelated.
- anaphor 13y agoNot completely unrelated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering but what he/she was talking about is unrelated.
- sp332 13y agoI don't want to be condescending, but that isn't what the theorem says. (I'm not even sure it's true.) Incompleteness means there is a true statement, that cannot be proved true inside the system.
- gohrt 13y agoAnd the contrapositive is that any sufficiently complex complete system is inconsistent.
- sp332 13y agoOh man, brokentone was right this whole time. Sorry brokentone!
- brokentone 13y agoI'm only able to flirt with the edges of understanding this deep philosophy/math, so I can see correlations, but not defend them