Oscar Benjamin <[email protected]>:
> This isn't even a question of resource constraints: a digital computer
> with infinite memory and computing power would still be limited to
> working with countable sets, and the real numbers are just not
> countable. The fundamentally discrete nature of digital computers
> prevents them from being able to truly handle real numbers and real
> computation.
Well, if your idealized, infinite, digital computer had ℵ₁ bytes of RAM
and ran at ℵ₁ hertz and Python supported transfinite iteration, you
could easily do reals:
def real_sqrt(y):
for x in continuum(0, max(1, y)):
# Note: x is not traversed in the < order but some other
# well-ordering, which has been proved to exist.
if x * x == y:
return x
assert False
The function could well return in finite time with a precise result for
any given nonnegative real argument.
Marko
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