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From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Halting Problem Solved! Film at 11! (Was Re:
Message-ID: <2953@optima.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 8 May 91 17:56:03 GMT
Sender: news@cs.arizona.edu
Lines: 22

In article  <STEPHEN.91May7205714@pesto.uchicago.edu> Stephen P Spackman writes:
]In article <2861@optima.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
]
]|If you want to get theoretical, then you can _theoretically_ keep
]|buying tapes...
]
]There is definitely and without question a finite amount of matter in
]the universe that I am willing to make tapes out of.
]
]Evidently, I disagree. I am PERSONALLY willing to engineer my
]compilers on the assumption that (a) FTL travel, (b) many-worlds
]parallelism and (c) anything comparably revolutionary will not become
]available within the useful lifetime of the software.

Not fair, Stephen.  You took the theoretical argument and made
practical objections to it.  Your objections do not address the issue
of whether a computer is _theoretically_ a finite state machine -- and
I covered the practical issues in the part you did not cite.
--
					David Gudeman
gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
noao!arizona!gudeman