3 ms·
You are getting hung up on the practical. The rule that "if a program can compute something, then so can a human" is theoretical. It has nothing to do with how
by skizm 12y ago
You are getting hung up on the practical. The rule that "if a program can compute something, then so can a human" is theoretical. It has nothing to do with how long it would actually take a human to do something. Obviously humans make mistakes and won't live long enough to completely walk through even some of the more basic sorting algorithms given a large enough list.
The rule is one method to determine if a program is theoretically possible or not.
For example, writing a program to determine if a given piece of code contains an infinite loop is impossible.
Read up on Computability and Decidability for more examples of things that are impossible to write programs for.
- e12e 12y agoYes, I'm familiar with the theory of computation, I'm just not sure it applies to the ability to determine if a tweet is sarcasm or not. Or, put it another way, if a human had enough time and the ability to access the amount of data a computer system can, perhaps the human would better be able to determine if a given tweet is sarcasm, than the same human without such help. I do agree (with you and Pope) that sarcasm might be indeterminable in the general case. Now, if a computer system that has superhuman domain knowledge of the author can tell if a tweet is sarcastic, but a human can not -- is the tweet then, in fact, sarcastic? I'd say that's an open question.