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[DPRG] Re: Allen Robots (Will's emotions)
Subject: [DPRG] Re: Allen Robots (Will's emotions)
From: Randy M. Dumse
rmd at newmicros.com
Date: Mon Mar 12 13:40:11 CDT 2007
> What I question is your belief (as it seems to me) that they
> are useful to model everything.
My belief is not that they are useful tools for modeling
everything, but that they are excellent for modeling many things
real time, which turns out to be almost everything I find
interesting.
> I am not convinced that animal behavior can be
> modelled well by a finite state machine.
> Neither am I convinced that it cannot.
If you were convinced RLL (Relay Ladder Logic) could explain
production machine behavior? If I could show you RLL was a
limited subset of FSM, would you then say FSM's could model
production machine behavior?
Are you convinced animal behavior can be modeled by BBR? If I
could show you how BBR was a limited subset of FSM, would you
then say FSM's could model animal behavior?
If not, do you know of anything that can for certain model
animal behavior?
> I assume that you are talking about quantum physics when you
> say "physics at very deep levels",
Yes.
> but this seems to rebut your
> point that physics is, fundamentally, a state machine.
I find your argument including Bell's theorem a bit non-sequitar
and stretched. But perhaps we try to chew too big a piece.
Just to wave a hand at the problem, here is some of my reverence
for physics.
To me at the deepest levels physics is an interplay of energy
and time.
Time is what happens where energy (and mass) isn't. The fastest
time rates are those far away from gravitating sources and all
mass/energy/stress gravitate.
At the opposite extreme, near a black hole, time slows to a
crawl, as the rest of the far away universe hurries by.
Push a little energy inside a black hole, and it can no longer
be identified as energy. It is now mass, or energy in a state of
non-changing capture. Outside the hole, only mass, charge, and
angular momentum remain.
Likewise, the proper time experienced by a photon in flight is
zero. No time passes for it as it crosses the width of the
universe.
My first exposure to state in physics was the Bohr model of the
hydrogen atom. Certain states are allowed, and certain not. When
a photon is absorbed by a hydrogen atom, an electron changes
state. The mass of the atom increases. Energy appears as mass,
and in this state, time decides how long the photon can stay.
So physics is an interplay between the two extremes, energy and
time.
What state machines are to me is the recognition of order. Time
is what keeps everything from happening at once, and when energy
and time are not in interplay, that is a period worth noting.
Such a period is a state. In a state, no processing is
necessary.
Since not everything has hardware detection, during a state, the
only processesing necessary to be done is that to determine if
it is time to change the state. But no outputs are generated
during the holding of state.
> I would appreciate being shown to be wrong on either (or
> both) of these topics, but until then I will likely remain
> unconvinced of the finite state machine as the all-purpouse
> real-world modelling tool.
Rather than personally try to prove the finite state machine as
an all-purpose modeling tool, in particular for computing, let
me ask:
Where do you stand on UTM (Universal Turing Machine)? Do you
accept Church Turing thesis?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church-Turing_thesis
"Many machines that might be thought to have more computational
capability than a simple universal Turing machine can be shown
to have no more power (Hopcroft and Ullman p. 159, cf Minsky
(1967)). They might compute faster, perhaps, or use less memory,
or their instruction set might be smaller, but they cannot
compute more powerfully (i.e. more mathematical functions).
(Recall that the Church-Turing thesis hypothesizes this to be
true: that anything that can be "computed" can be computed by
some Turing machine.)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine
In particular recall the Turin machine is a finite state
machine.
Randy
www.newmicros.com
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