But there is a single company in charge of the service... if that company disappears or the company servers shut off, your messages will disappear (just as it happens when twitter shuts off).
I found it light, and boring because of how light it was. I had studied Gödel's theorems, etc., so I really could not take the pace for explaining the logic stuff (most of the book) in GEB.
By the way, I would recommend any programmer interested in physics "The Road to Reality" by Penrose. I think that's a very challenging book, that can be interesting for programmers, even if it's not about programming. Compared to that kind of material, GEB is very, very light.
" It's trivial to show that a Chinese Room that could converse for more than 15 minutes would have to contain more elementary particles than the entire planet."
I've read up a little more on the Chinese Room and I retract my argument. I misunderstood the idea.
I thought Searle was asserting that a human mind can be simulated by a dumb program that only provided cached responses. It's easy to show there are more than 10e50 possible conversational paths in a 15 minute conversation (even a chess game has that many, and conversation is more complex than chess), and there are only 10e50 atoms on earth.
But it seems Searle's real argument was that the man inside the box is performing all the actions of an artificially intelligent computer program, just with pencil and paper. Humans clearly perform such actions with just a few pounds of brain matter. Even if the Chinese Room operator requires continent-wide resources, such difficulties don't address the essence of Searle's argument.
He seems to be asserting there's something special about the brain called "intentionality" which is unlike a computer running an algorithm. He might be right, but there seems to be no evidence for such a thing, or any way to prove that an entity which claimed "intentionality" didn't really have it.
I still don't believe you. So the numbers are made up? "15 minutes" -> "entire planet"? How much for 10 minutes? And for 1 minute? Is that obvious too?
So you think it's very obvious that it's impossible to build a chatbot that speaks chinese for 15 minutes in a computer like the one I'm using now (even one that claims to be a child for example). And why couldn't we just clone a Chinese person brain and say it's a computer? Why do you think a brain snapshot would require the size of a planet?
Ah, sorry, the "more elementary particles than the entire planet" claim wasn't made by me. My first comment was too vague, here is another try:
Yes, it sounds like a very strange claim, since isn't biological material made from elementary particles, and clearly you could fit someone who speaks Chinese into the room. Obviously that assumes that people are made of elementary particles, but if someone is going to argue that, I'm going to need a better definition of elementary particles to make any progress.
CLRS is the classic textbook for Algorithms... For some topics Klienberg and Tardos is good, I will suggest to read the CLRS text and keep K&T for topics you want to read more on, also the K&T problems are much harder (usually) than CLRS.
for their intro algorithms class. I TA'd a semester with this book, and while it definitely has its warts it is much more compact and readable than CLRS.
I'll second Intro to Algorithms, which has been mentioned. It's what I used in my algorithms class and it's quite comprehensive. (It will also take you a while to get through.)
