Talk:Expload

Hmmmm
This didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. It has its roots in an older idea of mine (provisionally called GI) to use undirected, unlabelled graphs as the instructions, and then to compare the undirected graphs in the programs to the ones defined as instructions. That would be in the complexity class GI, which is not known to equal either P or NP. Here, I wanted to have something that was definitely outside P, and there is of course the possibility that tomorrow, it will be shown that GI, or maybe even NP, is just P anyway. But GI is also computationally unavoidable in a way Expload isn't. (In Expload, you can always make turmoids which are trivial and which can be resolved easily.)  But, implementing the instructions to assemble undirected, unlabelled graphs would've been more work. (I encourage anyone who wants to try designing GI to do so, because it could also be fun. But if you do, please give it a better name than GI)

But there's maybe a more difficult issue in that the language doesn't force you to write "inherently slow code", and if it did, it would probably have to be in some contrived way (you cannot use the same turmoid more than 5 times? the b in every turmoid must be at least twice as large as the b in the previous?)... and to say that it can't guarantee that instructions are executed efficiently, well, that's true for any language: just write your program in the manner of: write a Tag system interpreter then feed it symbols which encode a NTM which reduces lambda calculus forms which you feed it which... etc. Chris Pressey (talk) 01:04, 6 December 2012 (UTC)


 * This isn't a particularly interesting design space (though it is quite stinky) because it's obvious that while one can force the programmer to write more and more annoying and obtuse variations on testing if a Turing machine halts after n steps, it'd be very very difficult to force them to apply these tests to arbitrarily complex TMs without foisting essentially random TMs on them, say by enumerating TMs and saying "ok, here's the next one." Programming in that would be, well, quite difficult.  Still, I have hopes that the House of Expload will one day produce a scion who will go far in life... Chris Pressey (talk) 14:19, 7 December 2012 (UTC)