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.
Does that mean the church-turing thesis is a barrier to progress?
As a working programmer who isn’t afraid to read academic papers, I can say it absolutely isn’t. Neither the lambda calculus nor turing machines make more than a cameo appearance in the pragmatically useful literature.
On the other hand, Algol 60 derived pseudocode and the abstract machine that it implies is ubiquitous.
Comments
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.
As a working programmer who isn’t afraid to read academic papers, I can say it absolutely isn’t. Neither the lambda calculus nor turing machines make more than a cameo appearance in the pragmatically useful literature.
On the other hand, Algol 60 derived pseudocode and the abstract machine that it implies is ubiquitous.