10,658 research outputs found

    Consequences of a Goedel's misjudgment

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    The fundamental aim of the paper is to correct an harmful way to interpret a Goedel's erroneous remark at the Congress of Koenigsberg in 1930. Despite the Goedel's fault is rather venial, its misreading has produced and continues to produce dangerous fruits, as to apply the incompleteness Theorems to the full second-order Arithmetic and to deduce the semantic incompleteness of its language by these same Theorems. The first three paragraphs are introductory and serve to define the languages inherently semantic and its properties, to discuss the consequences of the expression order used in a language and some question about the semantic completeness: in particular is highlighted the fact that a non-formal theory may be semantically complete despite using a language semantically incomplete. Finally, an alternative interpretation of the Goedel's unfortunate comment is proposed. KEYWORDS: semantic completeness, syntactic incompleteness, categoricity, arithmetic, second-order languages, paradoxesComment: English version, 19 pages. Fixed and improved terminolog

    Naming the largest number: Exploring the boundary between mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics

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    What is the largest number accessible to the human imagination? The question is neither entirely mathematical nor entirely philosophical. Mathematical formulations of the problem fall into two classes: those that fail to fully capture the spirit of the problem, and those that turn it back into a philosophical problem

    Computation Environments, An Interactive Semantics for Turing Machines (which P is not equal to NP considering it)

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    To scrutinize notions of computation and time complexity, we introduce and formally define an interactive model for computation that we call it the \emph{computation environment}. A computation environment consists of two main parts: i) a universal processor and ii) a computist who uses the computability power of the universal processor to perform effective procedures. The notion of computation finds it meaning, for the computist, through his \underline{interaction} with the universal processor. We are interested in those computation environments which can be considered as alternative for the real computation environment that the human being is its computist. These computation environments must have two properties: 1- being physically plausible, and 2- being enough powerful. Based on Copeland' criteria for effective procedures, we define what a \emph{physically plausible} computation environment is. We construct two \emph{physically plausible} and \emph{enough powerful} computation environments: 1- the Turing computation environment, denoted by ETE_T, and 2- a persistently evolutionary computation environment, denoted by EeE_e, which persistently evolve in the course of executing the computations. We prove that the equality of complexity classes P\mathrm{P} and NP\mathrm{NP} in the computation environment EeE_e conflicts with the \underline{free will} of the computist. We provide an axiomatic system T\mathcal{T} for Turing computability and prove that ignoring just one of the axiom of T\mathcal{T}, it would not be possible to derive P=NP\mathrm{P=NP} from the rest of axioms. We prove that the computist who lives inside the environment ETE_T, can never be confident that whether he lives in a static environment or a persistently evolutionary one.Comment: 33 pages, interactive computation, P vs N
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