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What have you shown? | 758 comments | Create New Account
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What have you shown?
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, October 20 2012 @ 09:50 PM EDT

Computation theory automatically shows an algorithm is an algorithm when it is written in a language that can only express algorithms.

So what you have shown is that a computer program is a program when it is run on a computer that can only execute programs. You haven't described how to write a program for any particular purpose

I'll refer you to Wikipedi a as a reference because I don't have the time to look through my old textbooks and other references. But in a similarly algorithmic field, it can be shown using Shannon's information theorem that channel capacity has the following property related to communicating at information rate R (where R is usually bits per symbol). For any information rate R 0, for large enough N, there exists a code of length N and rate ≥ R and a decoding algorithm, such that the maximal probability of block error is ≤ ε; that is, it is always possible to transmit with arbitrarily small block error. In addition, for any rate R > C, it is impossible to transmit with arbitrarily small block error.

In other words, it is possible to communicate over a channel, such as a binary symmetric channel, with arbitrary reliability up to a certain rate at a given signal to noise ratio, and above this rate, nothing gets through.

But what information theory doesn't tell you is how to do so. In other words, the theory does not tell you how to find an optimum code for transmitting at the highest possible rate over the channel. Neither can your assertions about Turing machines help me find a particular algorithm to solve a particular problem. All we learn from your dissertation is that, if you write a program that can be run on a digital computer, it is a program made up of symbols and therefore is mathematics.

But it takes a lot of engineering and invention to find practical, near-optimal digital codes for transmission of information, particularly over many real-world channels. Have you ever had a digital cell phone call dropped? Have you ever tried to pick up a DTV signal over the air without signal drops or pixelation? Disregarding novelty and obviousness (which are separate questions), are you prepared to say that practical solutions to these problems do not qualify as patentable subject matter?

So I suggest that your argument is still not persuasive even if we assume everything that you say is all provably true.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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