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From: gds@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU (Greg Skinner)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Re: Value of Computer Science degree
Message-ID: <1182@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 5-Mar-86 03:52:16 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.1182
Posted: Wed Mar  5 03:52:16 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 8-Mar-86 07:41:49 EST
References: <214@eddie.UUCP> <3850042@csd2.UUCP>
Followup-To: net.math
Organization: MIT Lusers and Hosers Inc., Cambridge, Ma.
Lines: 28

In article <3850042@csd2.UUCP>, sykora@csd2.UUCP (Michael Sykora) writes:
> >/* gds@eddie.UUCP (Greg Skinner) /  5:03 pm  Feb 16, 1986 */
> 
> >Apparently, this was one of those MIT Course 6 people that "can't
> >program themselves out of a wet bag", because if they had learned
> >anything in their theoretical computer courses, they would have known
> >that such a program is mathematically impossible.
> 
> Is this notion not based on Church's Thesis, which, while there is
> a great deal of evidence to support it, is not mathematically provable?
> 
> Mike Sykora

This is true, however most of the objections to Church's Thesis,
Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, etc. are that they are not yet an
accepted branch of mathematics.  Yet in still, there are other
unsolvable problems which are not in the realm of computability theory
(for example, to quote from a Star Trek episode, you cannot "compute,
to the last digit, the value of pi").

Any future discussion on Church/Turing, uncomputability, etc., will be
done in net.math.
-- 
It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from goin' under.

Greg Skinner (gregbo)
{decvax!genrad, allegra, gatech, ihnp4}!mit-eddie!gds
gds@eddie.mit.edu