Re: Transactions: good or bad?

Todd Bandrowsky wrote:
> Well, it certainly would be a tall challenge, that's for sure.
>
>
>>Your pie in the sky is provably impossible to cook :)
>>
>>To quote the great logician Jean-Yves Girard "a cause des ces fichues
>>idees" (sorry for the lack of accents on my keyboard). In English it's
>>"because of those bloody ideas" (that they totally do not have). For the
>>whole delicious paper google on Jean-Yves Girard Les fondements des
>>Mathematiques.
>
>
> Thank you.
>
>
>>Test can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence.
>
>
> But what makes a test a test and a proof a proof? And, aren't proofs
> themselves often rather wordy? Isn't the proof for Fermats Last
> Theorem that someone came up with a few years back some 400 pages
> long?
>

Yes, it was with the help of a computer to weed out some test cases, but then it was a human who had the proof idea.

>
>>Yes, there are. But it has nothing to do with your current claim (that
>>you can exhaustively test computer programs).
>
>
> My current claim was that the you could use the information in the
> program to generate test cases sufficient to do a test, coupled with
> an expert system for weaning out already proved things.
> Theoretically, I think you could do this, and then have a wired up
> world where everything was a gigantic peer to peer bus of formation
> knowledge expressed through correctly working software.
>

20th century mathematicak logic points to the direction that computers can't be that intelligent.

However, they make a fancy tool in the toolbox.

>
>>Yep, and related to logical assertions, there are like tons of problems
>>that are provably undecidable, impossible, NP-complete or otherwise
>>infeasible.
>
>
> If they are provably undecidable, then, how do people decide them? I
> mean, travelling salesman is NP complete but we still have algorithms
> that express a "best shot".

Well, unlike computers, people are intelligent. If you ask me how are we intelligent, I'll answer that I don't know exactly how, but we are intelligent enough to proof theorems and program computers. These things are provably beyond the grasp of computers, at least the way wer understand computers and programs and proofs.

That's as far as I know how to explain.

Best,
Costin Received on Thu Jun 12 2003 - 15:26:20 CEST