John, (01)
Thanks for the citation from Wolfram. (02)
On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 6:01 AM, John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-737
>
> For example, Wolfram says (p. 741)
>
> SW> [Computational irreducibility implies] that for many systems
> > no systematic prediction can be done, so that there is no
> > general way to shortcut their process of evolution, and as
> > a result their behavior must be considered computationally
> > irreducible. (03)
Yes, that is a good statement of what I am trying to say. (04)
> In other words, Wolfram is saying that the amount of computation
> needed to predict what the system will do may be extremely large,
> but finite. The technical term for that is 'intractable'. (05)
Now we are talking about your words. I don't see any hint of
"extremely large" in Wolfram's statement, let alone "intractable". (06)
What Wolfram says is that "for many systems ... there is no general
way to shortcut their process" (07)
That is what I am suggesting too. (08)
My comment to Ali was that the fact that "for many systems ... there
is no general way to shortcut their process" might explain why our
attempts at syntactic "shortcuts" (grammars) have failed to usefully
disambiguate natural language, and that we might be able to do better
by treating syntactic predictions purely as a process, distinct from
any "shortcuts" abstracted from that process. (09)
-Rob (010)
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