Re: Turing Machines and Physical Computation

From: Eray Ozkural exa (examachine_at_gmail.com)
Date: 11/30/04 

Date: 30 Nov 2004 12:28:23 -0800

Neil W Rickert <rickert+nn@cs.niu.edu> wrote in message news:<coe8th$tdu$1@usenet.cso.niu.edu>...
> >The putative difficulty in writing effective software is a more common
> >and mundane version of the same thing, IMHO.
>
> That's actually a quite different problem.
>
> Computation is the manipulation of representations.

I am not sure if that's a good description.

This formal symbol manipulation idea got some otherwise ambitious
philosophers like Brian Cantwell Smith and gang quite confused.

Computers can work on representations, that's true. But it is not
necessary that what is being manipulated is "representation".

Regards, 

--
Eray

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