[FOM] Potgieter on hypercomputation

[Vladimir Sazonov]

Apostolos Syropoulos wrote:
> And how can we be sure what is the extend of the whole universe?
> And what's outside the whole universe? These are not just metaphysical
> questions...

This could be discussed, of course, but I do not want to do this
to concentrate on what is important to explain my position.
(I also think Feynman realized what he wrote.)

> Well, if your run on your machine the following simple Perl script:
> 
> use bigint;
> print 2**1000;
> 
> you will get almost immediately the following output on your screen:
> 
> 1071508607186267320948425049060001810561404811705533607443750388370351
> 0511249361224931983788156958581275946729175531468251871452856923140435
> 9845775746985748039345677748242309854210746050623711418779541821530464
> 7498358194126739876755916554394607706291457119647768654216766042983165
> 2624386837205668069376
> 
> So, is this infinity?

Note, that the expression 2^1000 also denoting this number is even
shorter!

The problem is that I should tell explicitly that I, quite naturally,
assume natural numbers in unary notation (3=|||, etc.; please, modify
and rerun your program even for 2^100; what means "the number of
electrons" or the like?), and probably something more...
See also my reply in FOM to Arnon Avron.


Vladimir Sazonov