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Wed 2007-10-03 09:42
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[identity profile] kaet.livejournal.comFri 2007-10-05 01:07
Sorry about drunkenly misremembering things tonight. I was after half-remembered Chaitin's Constant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant), which is definable but incomputable.
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[personal profile] simontFri 2007-10-05 10:26
Hmm, yes. That differs from the construction we discussed last night (a binary expansion with bit i set if the program represented by i halts), but both have the property of being a non-computable real which you can precisely mathematically define.

Chaitin's constant contains less information than the silly binary expansion number, but since it's a probability it's almost justifiable as something you might actually want to talk about, unlike the binary expansion number which is very obviously only a pathological counterexample :-)
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[identity profile] kaet.livejournal.comFri 2007-10-05 11:26
Yes. I'd not looked at this area for a few years.

The one I mentioned last night is, as far as I can tell, entirely my own bitrotted rubbish!
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[personal profile] simontFri 2007-10-05 11:35
It's one I've heard before, though. It's probably the single most natural thing to spring to your mind if someone challenges you to define an uncomputable real. Chaitin's version is more elegant but less obvious.
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