Cognitive Daily has an interesting discussion going on about whether or not an artificial intelligence requires a body. There are some interesting posts in the discussion, but as with most of these discussions, it quickly turned into a matter of “what does it mean to be intelligent?”
To drop my two cents in on the matter, I must say that the answer to the question is obviously yes; but we have to define “body.”
In one of those funny coincidences where it seems the popular mind is pregnant with an idea, an article was recently published to the programming section on reddit that mentions the busy beaver function. The article is titled “Who Can Name The Bigger Number?” and is essentially about trying to name very large integers.
The article is fairly long, but also quite interesting. The associated thread on reddit is also interesting, but is topped by a very similar discussion on the XKCD blog about naming large numbers.
Computers are a wonderful invention, capable of a profound variety of actions. But there are limits to what a computer can do, and today I wish to talk about one of them. Specifically, I wish is discuss the Busy Beaver problem.
Reading this XKCD comic brings to mind something I’ve thought about off and on for a while now. Doing a quick google search brings up nothing on the subject, so here is a small attempt to at least sketch out the domain of a question/answer.
I think that some people don’t accept the (what I believe to be) self evident proposition that reality must be consistent.