I feel like this is looking at things through the wrong lens and forcing them to fit in an uncomfortable way.
Do interactive incentive based protocols like bitcoin (or even bittorrent) provide a fascinating and fundamentally different design space than traditional algorithms operating on input and returning output?
Sure, i'll grant that.
Are Turing machines the right abstraction to model them? No probably not.
Does that mean the church-turing thesis is a barrier to progress?
This is where the post lost me. I'd go with obviously not. The church-turing thesis isn't even very important for normal real-world algorithm development unless you are wondering if your program halts. It seems obvious here that that is not the barrier.
That said, I think there is a thread of truth here that our current models of computation aren't sufficient to capture interactive protocols where ecconomic or behavioural incentives play a significant role. I'd even agree that to really make such protocols, we have to understand the space better, and we can only do that by being able to model it.
I don't know if i really disagree so much as dislike the way the author presents it. I feel like the author is giving some metaphysical importance to turing machines and their relation to the soul and the unknowableness of the other. All this borderline religious mubo jumbo obscures what is really going on.
i just see this as a case where all models are wrong but some models are useful. Algorithms where economic/behavioural effects matter need to use a model informed by fields like psychology, sociology, economics etc (i want to say psychohistory) and not pure computer science. That's all.
Sure, we need more work to find such models, but its not a fundamental shift. We do that all the time when modelling new phenomenon.
It seems like there is a fallacy baked in here; that since all computaion is Turing-computable, that all models of computation are equivalent?
A computation system is an execution mechanism plus data on which to compute, plus an program or meta-algorithm. Otherwise the computation and the mechanism are unified and the device is a calculator, and not a computer.
The assumption that systems with unknown data and algorithms (somewhat the current state of LLMS) are fundamentally not Turing computable is demonstrably false.
That the Turing machine itself is fundamentally a different computation mechanism than a Turing machine with a program of arbitrary complexity, however, is true, and is what I think the author may be rubbing against?
The meta-algorithm of a program vs the algorithm inherent in processing equipment is I think what the author is seeing here. some languages seek to constrain the potential randomness of the meta-algorithm . This does certainly constrain the possibilities of their output, by design, and can be as constraining to innovation as it is to undesired behavior for this reason; the requirement is to understand the problem in its entirety before beginning, which is to say that these languages excel at problems that are a priory already solved.
Anyway, that’s my ramble about the authors ramble lol.
Note the downward trend in the number of new programming languages per decade. Probably because this field of CS has reached maturity stage and new greenfield projects are less in demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_langua...
This thesis seems to be limited to a narrow corner of computer science akin to Turing's work: what is computable, etc.
Lucky for us that's only a narrow corner I guess?
I remain unconvinced, but maybe LLM's will provide progress without individual comprehension?
(at which point we should maybe be speaking of Applied Computation rather than Computer Science? then again, at systems institutions that Rubicon has already been crossed...)
> A famous researcher once said that a scientist should not work more than 5-6 years in the same research area.
Who said this?
Anything that cannot be grasped by an individual, cannot be taught. This means the gains that are emergent, will eventually be lost.