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'Remarkable' Mathematical Proof Describes How to Solve Seemingly Impossible Computing Problem:
You enter a cave. At the end of a dark corridor, you encounter a pair of sealed chambers. Inside each chamber is an all-knowing wizard. The prophecy says that with these oracles' help, you can learn the answers to unanswerable problems. But there's a catch: The oracles don't always tell the truth. And though they cannot communicate with each other, their seemingly random responses to your questions are actually connected by the very fabric of the universe. To get the answer you seek, you must first devise... the questions.
Computer scientists are buzzing about a new mathematical proof that proposes a quantum-entangled system sort of like the one described above. It seems to disprove a 44-year-old conjecture and details a theoretical machine capable of solving the famous halting problem, which says a computer cannot determine whether it will ever be able to solve a problem it's currently trying to solve.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @02:02PM (1 child)
You are correct, however, local realism (which I think was favored by Einstein), that is the theory that quantum uncertainty is just a matter of a hidden variable that can change (realism) while also obeying the causality speed limit (locality, and that speed limit is the speed of light), has been disproved by experiment.
http://www.geneman.com/pubs/physics_bell/A_Physics_based_Disproof_of_Bells_Theorem.pdf [geneman.com]
So what this means is that either, locality is not (that is information can travel faster than the speed of light) or realism is not (that is that quantum mechanics is not the result of hidden variables, but is, in fact, probabilistic).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday January 20 2020, @04:14PM
That requires some additional qualification. Because many-minds is deterministic at the fundamental level (the universal wave function has no randomness at all), but doesn't require faster-than-light travel either (what changes on observation is not the distant particle, but your mind — it simply gets entangled with the measured particle, and if that particle was entangled with a distant one, your mind therefore now is also entangled with the distant one).
Note that doesn't mean that in many-minds you can predict the outcome of a quantum measurement. But that's because in the grand scheme of things, that result doesn't exist; all that exists is an entangled state where in each branch there's another value you observed. There's no single value that objectively has been observed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.