A mind that can fully comprehend any given system must, itself, be more complicated than the system that it’s comprehending. If the system is “everything”, then the mind must itself be part of the system, and so full comprehension is impossible.
Back in 1978, local papers used to try to find the person in town who had seen Star Wars the most times. Don’t remember how strict the criteria for proof were-- I’m thinking “not very.” But I read an article about a kid in PA who’d seen the film more than 100 times, and saved all his ticket stubs. There was a picture with the article.
Hmmm. IIRC, he was a natural redhead. I guess he could have been on either team.
Susan Olsen wasn’t a natural, bright-yellow, blonde, although I’m not sure how dark her hair was-- but maybe she could have played for both as well. Supposedly, Sherwood Schwartz fell in love with her at her audition, and told all the other “Cindys” waiting to go home. Maybe they were planning to use her either way.
This leads us to the question of whether there is someone who is The Unluckiest Person In The World (probably a constantly changing name as such a person probably doesn’t live a long life).
And conversely, there should be someone who is The Luckiest Person In The World (AKA Teela Brown)
Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone, survived many brushes with death at a young age. While he was alive, he woulda been a contender.
Clearly the universe was trying to avoid saxophones to be inflicted on humanity, but it didn’t work…..
But any man who fought the Universe and won … is a man to be reckoned with.
How about the guy who was struck by lightning 7 times?
He’s dead, Jim…
I’m sure someone knows what group recorded the zydeco-esque version of “Who Wrote The Book Of Love” that I taped off the radio back in the mid-80s. I’ve had no luck using things like Shazam or asking on message boards.
They are needed as this will prove
“THAT” guy…
It would be easy to find people who never watch movies at all, or who see them very seldom. There are probably also quite a few who average out to one per year. But a person who sees exactly one movie per year is another thing entirely.
The trailers for Disney’s Brother Bear made the obvious joke: “Wait, if they only see one movie this year, isn’t it the one they’re about to see?”
But that is not what the post I was replying to was about. It was about the target of “if you only watch one movie per year” and yes one of zero would qualify.
Actually for several years I watched exactly one (feature length) movie per year, on Christmas night. It was a tradition in our siblings and it survived well into adulthood. We’d go to our parents place for Christmas lunch, hang out for a few hours then go to a movie. Unless you count planetarium shows and IMAX documentaries as movies.
I’ve heard this claim but I’m not sure I buy it. This kind of reasoning would lead one to conclude that a computer program that prints a copy of itself is impossible, which is false.
A computer program being able to print a copy of itself in some form is trivial and has nothing to do with comprehension.
One might engage in philosophical arguments about exactly what “comprehension” means, but basically I think the original statement is correct.
There might be a different definition of ‘comprehension’ that thinks it understands the situation fully, but doesn’t really. A kind of Dunning-Kruger comprehension where you might only have the faintest idea of what is going on.
In the real world, that probably the best we can ever hope for; misplaced confidence.
On the other hand, computer programs can’t, in general, determine whether they will terminate.
Strictly speaking, Turing’s theorem applied to computers with infinite memory, which is unrealistic. For a computer with finite memory, it’s possible for a finite computer program to determine if a program running on that computer will terminate… but the program that does that would require more memory than was allocated to the original program.
IMO not quite. Because the “system” that does the printing incorporates a lot more than the source code of the program that gets printed.
OTOH if you could write a program that “printed” a complete process for creating its own hardware, created that hardware, and its power supply, and OS, and compiler / interpreter, and itself, now you’d have a Gödel-complete system.
Hugely greater degree of difficulty in the latter task vs a mere quine. Impossibly huger.