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Prime numbers

Name: Anonymous 2011-03-09 17:42

Does anyone else find the Sieve of Eratosthenes and the ilk a totally pointless concept?

It like over optimising a Java program that could be written in C in a short space of time.

Name: Anonymous 2011-03-22 21:16

>>76
The problem here lies with those within the system, but if you could look at the system from outside, it would look deterministic, no matter what the structure is.

If you are a structure within a system and the only way for you to measure other data is to interact/change it (thus making your measurements inaccurate) that doesn't make the system less deterministic, it merely makes it non-deterministic to that piece of data which is trying to measure some other data inexactly and thus cannot predict the future state. It's also possible that even if the data could measure all the other data exactly, it would still be unable t ocompute the future state as it would require itself to know the state of all the data in the system and emulate it, but the information contents would be much larger than it could be held within the system (as it is subject to limitations of the system, assuming a digital one: if real numbers are involved (if they can even exist in a physical system), it all goes to hell and lots of weird stuff becomes possible). It's the same way as trying to emulate a virtual machine within the guest OS (and include the guest OS within the emulation too) while not requiring more memory - it's impossible.

All this just means the system is non-deterministic to the information inside it, but not as a structure when viewed from the outside.

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