/sci/ - Science & Math

I don't want a fraction of his cancer, either. That shit multiplies.

If there were no legal repercussions, I don't know how I could give such an offer the cold shoulder. In short: yes.

No, I'm smarter than he is.

>Implying I haven't killed someone for some naval shavings

>>2543921

>fraction of a small number
>even smaller

nope.avi

I kid, Christopher Hitchens is a pretty cool guy. eh is an atheist and doesnt afraid of anything

Can god do what he won't do?

>>2543938
>thinks "smarter than" is equivalent to" full on retarded by comparison"
He lies somewhere on the line between Asimov and Superman.

I'm quite happy with my own intelligence, though I WOULD kill for Hitchens' eloquence.

Despite 4 years of attending a very good boarding school, I was never taught the "transatlantic" accent. I so wish I could somehow acquire a transatlantic accent without living in the shithole we call the UK for an extended period of time.

>>2543974
>I WOULD kill for Hitchens' eloquence.
His character is the best thing about him.

Can god create an argument so powerful that Christopher Hitchens couldn't destroy it.


Spoilers:
Nope

He's going to die too soon. :'(

I would listen to a debate of his every morning before going to Law school.

>>2543921
Hitchens doesn't even into math&physics. Why would I be threatened by his intelligence?

Not for his intelligence, for his ability to vocally and mentally eviscerate his opponents on/in their own terms.

>>2544003
I didn't say you necessarily need be threatened. For example, I too have a vocation in something he doesn't do, but I'd kill that part of me to gain what his intelligence would offer me.

>>2544003
>doesn't even into
Because he can form a sentence.

>>2544017
im 2g 4 english, fag, i write only in formulae

If you are a religious apologist invited to debate Christopher Hitchens, decline.

- Richard Dawkins

>>2544038
Your thinking ability is nothing short of formulaic either. Hitch's organic thought processes are something to envy and relish.

>>2544017
But can he recognize a meme?

>>2544038
How about a CFG rule for an English sentence then?

S → NP VP
NP → NP PP
NP → Noun
VP → VP PP
VP → Verb NP

>>2544057
Could you annotate that?

>>2544065
// Useful for parsing a general sentence structure for English
// Is Turing incomplete owing to the fact that English isn't.

Hawaii fag here.

Did anyone else, from Hawaii, hear our university radio station play a speech/debate on radio station in between songs?

*Song songs*
Christopher Hitchens Debate Against God/Christianity/Islam
*Back to songs*

I was like wut, loled and fist pumped.

>>2544082
What the fuck do you mean English is turing incomplete? Turing completeness refers to a machine, or a set of machines, and their ability to compute things. English is not a machine in that sense. It does not compute things.

>>2544096
Turing completeness refers to grammars, it has nothing to do with machines. For example the formatting scheme for LaTeX is Turing Complete and it could be followed by a human.

>>2544105
A set of languages is isomorphic to a set of machines.

So, you mean to say that the language English is recognizable by a Turing machine? Of course it is.

You mean to say that English is describable by a context free grammar? Also correct. (Well, you could have an obscenely big complex grammar to handle all of the semantic cases, but let's just ignore that for now.)

>>2544121
Nevermind. I came in late. Can you explain what point you're trying to make? I just saw you claim English is Turing complete - aka English is recognizable by a Turing machine. What are you trying to conclude from that?

someone give me a good youtube vid please

>>2544057
>>2544082
>>2544096
>>2544105
>>2544121
>>2544132
I almost never come to this board.

Just thought I'd give you guys credit: this board, out of all of them, has the most astute people.

Cheers /sci/.

>>2544121
English is definitely not Turing Complete.

>>2544121
>You mean to say that English is *not* describable by a context free grammar? Also correct. (Well, you could have an obscenely big complex grammar to handle all of the semantic cases, but let's just ignore that for now.)
Fixed. Missed the not. My bad.

>>2544142
I agree. I'm in the humanities and come to /sci/ mainly because the people here are pretty fucking intelligent.

>>2544145
>English is not recognizable by a Turing machine.
... meh?

Do you think that a Human can recognize the language English? Do you think that a human has more computing power than a Turing machine?

>>2544150
P.S. - I wasn't trying to prove any point, I was just asked to annotate it. a.k.a. general dickery.

>>2544156
When it comes to making computationally undefinable connections between sets of data, yes.

When it comes to working out large scale problems with definitive processes, no.

>>2544181
Well then, we're bordering on metaphysics, religion, and such. It is my belief that the human mind has no more computation power than a Turing machine. This conclusion is the best that I have based upon the available evidence.

As a separate point, English is totally recognizable by a Turing machine man. To say otherwise is pretty silly. The rules for it would be quite long, but it's finite. The number of English words is finite, so the number of semantic interactions is finite, so you could write rules to parse English - in principle. Of course, English changes regularly, and the rules are perhaps ambiguous and ill defined, which means that by that interpretation, even a human cannot parse English.

>>2544200
Humans minds definitely don't function like a TM, one our minds parallelize data transmission without a central control system, and two we don't store/process information in any fashion close to a tape. The closest we've come is using supercomputers to simulate neuron activity.

We'll meet somewhere in the middle, not one side or the other.

Either way this has gone grossly off-topic and probably should go back to writing my paper, with the hope that I could one day afford a supercomputer that can simulate the Hitches brain, and accent.

>>2544224
>Humans minds definitely don't function like a TM, one our minds parallelize data transmission without a central control system, and two we don't store/process information in any fashion close to a tape. The closest we've come is using supercomputers to simulate neuron activity.

You obviously have no clue what it means to be recognizable by a Turing machine, or the definition of computation power in this context. I am done with this argument, as it seems I won't get anywhere.

>>2544231
No, I'm afraid you are the one lacking in the necessary knowledge to have meaningful conversation about this.

Human brains are a jumbled mess and no two brains function exactly the same or follow exactly the same rules. A near inverse of what a Turing Machine is.

>>2544231
>doesn't know that turing recognizable and turing complete are different

>>2544253
A language is Turing recognizable if there exists a Turing machine which recognizes the language.

A set of machines is Turing complete if they recognize the same set of languages which the set of of Turing machines can recognize.

All supercomputers are Turing complete. Thus the guy is a retard for saying that the human mind has more computation power - which in context means can recognize more languages - than a Turing machine, because of single tape vs parallel processing and entirely irrelevant shit.

>>2544243
>No, I'm afraid you are the one lacking in the necessary knowledge to have meaningful conversation about this.
>Human brains are a jumbled mess and no two brains function exactly the same or follow exactly the same rules. A near inverse of what a Turing Machine is.

And none of that affects whether the human brain has more computation power - can recognize more languages - than a Turing machine.

Protip: The set of multi-tape Turing machines recognizes the same set of languages as the set of single tape Turing machines.

Protip: The set of languages recognized by any supercomputer is still the same set of languages recognizable by the set of Turing machines. That is, supercomputers are Turing complete. They recognize all computable languages The human brain is Turing complete. It can recognize all computable languages.

The fact that it can compute the answers in faster asymptotic analysis has absolutely nothing to do with Turing completeness.

>>2544264
Pseudo-intellectual detected, you're in way over your head if you think anything you copy and pasted verifies what you are trying to say. The set of Turing Complete languages is a small subset of Turing Recognizable languages.

>>2544253
I have no idea the difference between those, but then I'm not trying to post anything of value in the thread.

>>2544281
Perhaps I am having a brain fart moment, but I don't think so.

Could you cite some definitions? I'd be curious as to what we're disagreeing on. I mean, I am a professional programmer who regularly uses this shit. I'd like to think I know what I'm talking about.

>>2544291
Post's problem(and a little with the Halting problem).

Googling Theory of Computation and looking toward the end of some of the set theory stuff will show what I'm trying to say. (Not the wikipedia article, go down a few).

>>2544281
Specifically, what is the set of Turing complete languages? I don't know what that means.

Turing completeness is a property of a set of machines. Turing completeness is not a property of a (not programming) language.

Are we confusing the definition of the word language? In this discussion, I assumed that we were using the domain specific definitions, wherein "language" clearly refers to a set of strings, and not to "programming languages". Is that the problem?

>>2544316
I took Theory Of Computation in college. I got the highest grade in that class out of my entire year. University of Michigan. It's my second favorite class, second only to Discrete Math. You can't just say "Oh, good theory of computation". I could teach that course at University level.

Really. Can you please give a brief definition of a "Turing complete language", and a "Turing recognizable language".

>>2544331
As you haven't, allow me.

When I hear "Turing complete language", this refers to a Turing complete /programming/ language, that is a Turing complete set of machines.

When I hear "Turing recognizable language", this refers a language X for which there exists a Turing machine T where T recognizes X. X is not a programming language. X is not a machine.

A /programming/ language is different than a "language" in the context of computability. A language in this context is simply a set of strings, which of course is isomorphic to a subset of natural numbers if you prefer thinking about it that way.

A programming language is not simply a subset of natural numbers. A definition of a particular programming language must also encompass execution rules, how it processes its input, changes internal states, writes to temporary store, and so on.

>>2544403
Now of course, you can treat all programming languages as equivalent to corresponding Turing machines.

And you can serialize a Turing machine, which means that you can develop a injective function between Turing machines and Natural Numbers.

Thus one could talk about the Turing complete language. For a particular encoding of Turing machines to Natural Numbers, the set of all encoded Turing machines could be called the Turing complete language. Note that it's not "languages"; it's only a single set of Natural Numbers, so it's a language (singular).

(Could you construct a bijection encoding? Injective is easy enough. Sort of off topic. I'd have to ponder that for a moment. I'm tempted to say yes.)

Furthermore, we could consider only the traditional Turing machines which have a tape language of {0, 1}. Thus each Turing machine could be construed as recognizing a particular subset of Natural Numbers. Thus the set of Turing recognizable languages is a set of sets of Natural Numbers.

Under this view, one could talk about in a fuzzy way that the set of Turing recognizable languages is much larger than the Turing complete language. However, it would be rather improper to say one is the subset of the other - one being a set of sets of Natural Numbers, and the other is just a set of Natural Numbers.

>>2544316
>>2544281
So, no, not going to attempt to back that up? I admit I'm only proficient at the undergrad level, but that should be all that's required for this discussion.

>>2544478
boy did you get mad

it's cool though, props for the effort

ype

While he is intelligent he's more well versed and eloquent than anything else.

>professional atheist
>intelligence

>>2544671
Try actually making a point, retard.

>>2544478
it made me happy to see that you put that guy in his place <: ~

Christopher Hitchens is smarter and more educated than you. He supported Bush vs Gore and Bush vs Kerry.

Suck is lefties.

>>2544832
I try. As I said, I do this professionally for a living, and it is among my favorite coursework that I've ever taken. Also, duty calls.

>>2545040
1: no he didn't support Bush over Kerry
2: he hates bush as much as any leftist. Saying you made the same mistake as an intelligent person who later regretted doesn't make you intelligent (it actually makes you even dumber for refusing to admit when you're wrong)

>>2545045
You claim he regretted it later. Care to back it up? At least he did not regret it at Jan. 19, 2009.

Jan. 19, 2009 - "Why I'm not sorry that George W. Bush beat Al Gore and John Kerry." - http://www.slate.com/id/2209133/

quote from the article:
I want to say why I still do not wish that Al Gore had beaten George W. Bush in 2000 or that John Kerry had emerged the victor in 2004.

>>2545045
>>2545040
He does hate Bush. He just values attacking the "terrorist" states moreso than other public policy considerations, as he feels that crazy religious fuckers are the biggest threat to freedom in the world today, and he feels that the largest population of the most crazy religious fuckers with power in the world today is Islam.

it's hilarious to see people trumpet his arguments for the iraq war when they're basically the exact same as the bush administration's but with more eloquent wording (iraq liberation act, removing a brutal dictator from power, etc.)

also, when his reaction to it being a war for oil is: "so? oil is a valuable resource!" and when you bring up the deaths involved he says "well, i don't like the way the war was HANDLED..." lmao

>>2545040

Hitchens was a devout communist for a large portion of his life. And the only reason he no longer supports it is because he came to terms with the fact that capitalism won.

One of his biggest heroes is Fidelity Castro.

>>2545052
Yeah. He's rather unique among the popular "liberals" for his views in this area.

Personally, I don't so much hate the Iraq war for the reasons talked about today as much as I hate the blatant lies which were told to the American people to sell them on this war.

Oh, and the torture, which Hitchens is very clearly against and would love to see Bush tried for some crimes against humanity.

Charm and confidence are very easily mistaken for intelligence.

>>2545057
>>2545057
>>2545057

*Fidel Castro.

Fucking piece of shit iPhone.

He made God annoyed.

>>2545057
he still considers himself a marxist though, believes in dialectical and historical materialism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbJR2HN5V9c

>>2545096
Believing in dialectical materialism allows to criticize any possible order. He is good at that and people like that are needed (but only having such kind of people is not enough) for society.

He turned out to be too honest for the regular lefties, who do not mind manipulation or distortion of facts as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by their ideological bias.

>>2544040

And when Dawkins was openly challenged by WIlliam Lane Craig to a debate, he declined.

Dawkins in that little nigger standing behind the big nigger and taunting enemies and running when shit gets real.

That being said, Hitchens is an erudite hitman.

I would kill for a fraction of anyone's intelligence, as long as the fraction doesn't have to be a proper one and it can be of my choosing.

>>2545142

Your last line nailed it on the head.

Hitchens couched neo-con rhetoric in liberal terms, and it drove the left insane. They literally didn't know what to say when Hitchens started to defend the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Liberals (editor of The Nation magazine, George Galloway, etc.) marched lock-step into the trap of arguing with Hitch in public.

Lulz where had.

I think it's funny and poetic that Hitchens, who has spent so much of his life arguing against the idea of God, is dying of throat cancer.

Eat it bitch.

>>2546058
I'm sure the world is full of people that care about your thoughts on what is funny or poetic.

>>2546058

Troll harder nigger.

But his reply to that line of reasoning was hilarious: "I've blasphemed with worse organs than my throat."

He may be smart, but he likes boys.

Of course I must remark that one of the greatest fallacies I have encountered during my studies of Informational Quantomatics is that P = NP is actually not a closed system integral integer sensitive diurnal conglomerate but is in fact an inferential submatricular scatter plotted epsilon curve.