Xref: utzoo sci.philosophy.tech:581 rec.arts.sf-lovers:12103 rec.mag:46
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From: mincy@think.COM (Jeffrey Mincy)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,rec.arts.sf-lovers,rec.mag
Subject: Re: Ed Fredkin
Message-ID: <18358@think.UUCP>
Date: 22 Mar 88 00:36:15 GMT
References: <3829@chinet.UUCP> <1441@ur-tut.UUCP> <974@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> <1448@ur-tut.UUCP>
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Reply-To: mincy@brigit.think.com.UUCP (Jeffrey Mincy)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
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In article <1448@ur-tut.UUCP> srg2@tut.cc.rochester.edu.UUCP (Stacey Greenstein) writes:
>In article <974@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (Cliff Joslyn) writes:
>>Let's say I take all the information in all the encyclopedieas and
>>reference books and catalogs of biochemical compounds and make and ASCII
>>text file out of them, and then come up with an umpteen-zillion long
>>decimal number that represents this long text file, and then construct a
>>ruler one inch long calibrated to the umpteen-zillionth of an inch.  I
>>can now specify a single point in an inch representing all the knowledge
>>in the world. . .

>I never said anything about simplicity.  What you have is an EASY method of
>encoding.  The more you encode, the more information you need to decode, the
>more time it will take to decode the code.  Therefore if forty-two is indeed
>the hyper-encoded answer, the end result may take several billions of years
>to work itself out.  Or I could be wrong and forty-two is the answer, and
>someone forgot to turn off the ...

Actually, the problem of this approach is not that the result will
take billions of years to work out.  The real problem is that you
can not specify a single point on your inch ruler.  Somehow you
are going to have to mark the ruler.  If your point is the size of
an atom then you are limited to oh maybe 10^8 possible positions.
That only gives you an 8 digit long decimal number, hardly the
zillions that you need.  I suppose that it is possible that you
could use a point smaller than an atom to mark the ruler.
However, at a certain point, uncertainty kicks in and you will
not be able to measure the point.

>US Mail:   Stacey Robert Greenstein  BITNET: srg2@uordb1 


-- jeff
seismo!godot.think.com!mincy