Is this a true statement?

[Steve Holden]

"Jarno J Virtanen" <jajvirta at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote ...
> 25 Jun 2001 18:54:02 GMT Tim Daneliuk wrote:
> > I still do not understand/agree with this line of reasoning entirely.
> > As I mentioned in a previous post, one has to define what we mean by
> > "do" or "program".  It is a fundamental truth of Computer Science that
> > all Turing-Complete languages have *exactly* the same computational
> > abilities - i.e., They all handle the exact same set of algorithms -
> > in particular, those algorithms which are Turing Computable (which
> > excludes things like the Halting Problem).  This *includes* all
> > "interactions with the outside world" because such interaction
> > is, by definition, algorithmic.
>
> I think it is still the fundamental _hypothesis_, although it has
> strong evidental support. :-)
>
> > (Fine Point:  There is a debatable point here about whether adaptive
> > algorithms like those found in Genetic Programming are really formally
> > "algorithms" at all because they do not behave consistently when faced
with
> > he same input conditions, but that's way outside the scope of this
discussion.)
>
> I remember reading from a book titled "Mathematics: 2001 and beyond" (or
> something like that), that in theory a networked group of computers
> which all evolve independently is not restricted to "turing-completeness",
> but I honestly didn't grasp all the details. ;-)
>
Since a Tuirng-complete computer can compute any computable function, the
implication of such an assertion would be that a networked group of
comupters can compute non-computable functions. This seems unlikely to me.

looking-forward-to-machine-gestalt-intelligence-ly y'rs  - steve