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Comment by boombip

7 years ago

I find it unexpectedly hilarious that we now have issues that cannot be fully described without running the risk of crashing our machines. Its as if there are certain unholy words that could cause us to faint if we were to utter them.

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boombip

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yesenadam  7 years ago

Sounds right out of Gödel, Escher, Bach :

Achilles: I see the dilemma now. If any record player—say Record Player X—is sufficiently high-fidelity, then when it attempts to play the song "I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X", it will create just those vibrations which cause it to break...So it fails to be Perfect. And yet, the only way to get around that trickery, namely for Record Player X to be of lower fidelity, even more directly ensures that it is not Perfect. It seems that every record player is vulnerable to one or the other of those frailties, and hence all record players are defective. (p77)

  • rspeer  7 years ago

    Similarly (and also featured in a Hofstadter book), there's the short story "The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution" by Christopher Cherniak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riddle_of_the_Universe_and...

    I don't think anyone ever intended for text rendering to be a "sufficiently powerful formal system" like second-order logic, number theory, or like Hofstadter says the human brain is. I would hope that, in the absence of bugs, rendering text X on computer system Y would be a plain old computable function.