What is an algorithm and could a computer ever perform a non-algorithmic task? Computers are getting faster, algorithms are getting more complex, and our computing power is growing. With all these advancements, are there limitations that computers can never overcome?

Show Notes

• 01:22 | Roger Penrose – The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind
• 01:57 | Meet Eric Holloway
• 04:08 | Faster and faster computers and the Church-Turing thesis
• 05:03 | Deterministic and Non-deterministic Turing Computation
• 06:38 | The halting problem
• 07:20 | Past states, future states, and the inability to be purposeful
• 07:50 | Free will
• 08:40 | Axioms
• 09:50 | Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem
• 11:00 | Solomonoff Induction
• 11:25 | Kolmogorov Complexity
• 11:55 | Algorithmic Information Theory
• 13:04 | Consciousness and Qualia
• 14:00 | Ray Kurtzwell and transferring consciousness

Additional Resources

• Penrose, Roger and N. David Mermin, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (1990), 1214-1216.
• Penrose, Roger. Shadows of the Mind. Vol. 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Holloway, Eric and Robert Marks “Observation of Unbounded Novelty in Evolutionary Algorithms is Unknowable.” Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing (Springer, Cham: 2018), pp. 395-404.