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INTRODUCTION
At the Limits to Scientific Knowledge workshop held at the Santa Fe Institute during the period May 24 26, 1994, the participants agreed that it would be useful to set up an on-going teleconference to keep in touch on the many matters raised during the Workshop. As the first stage of this teleconference, participants agreed to submit one-page statements of their position(s) on aspects of limits to knowledge. This document contains these submissions in their raw, unexpurgated and unedited form. These initial statements sparked off additional discussion and debate on the general topic of the Workshop. The Appendix to this document contains these subsequent postings to the teleconference as of July 10, 1994.
Contents INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................ 2 John L. Casti and Joseph F. Traub FLOW PAST A CYLINDER: AN EXAMPLE OF LIMITED SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE .............................. 4 Lee A. Segel IMPOSSIBILITY RESULTS IN MATHEMATICS ..................................................................................... 6 Gregory J. Chaitin STUDY OF INTRINSIC LIMITS TO KNOWLEDGE ................................................................................. 8 Piet Hut LIMITS IN ECONOMICS ................................................................................................................... 10 Alfred P. Norman LIMITS TO SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE .............................................................................................. 12 Roger Shepard LIMITS TO SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE .............................................................................................. 14 Rolf Landauer UNDECIDABILITY AND BIOLOGY ................................................................................................... 15 Robert Rosen LIMITOLOGY ................................................................................................................................. 17 Otto Rssler FINAL COMMENTS ON THE LIMITS TO SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE WORKSHOP ............................. 18 E. Atlee Jackson KNOWLEDGE, RANDOMNESS AND SIMULATION ............................................................................ 20 P.-M. Binder ON UNDECIDABILITY AND INCOMPLETENESS ................................................................................ 22 F. A. Doria WHY UNDECIDABILITY IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO GDEL ............................................... 23 John L. Casti UPPING THE ANTE ......................................................................................................................... 24 Joseph Traub GENERAL REMARKS ...................................................................................................................... 26 R. E. Gomory APPENDIX ..................................................................................................................................... 27
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drag on the cylinder as Re . It would be nice to find such a formula. Or to prove that no such formula exists.
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Bibliography [1] G. J. Chaitin, Randomness and complexity in pure mathematics, International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos 4 (1994), pp. 315. [2] G. J. Chaitin, Responses to `Theoretical Mathematics , Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 30 (1994), pp. 181182. Questions for Future Research (1) What is an interesting or natural mathematical question? (2) How often is such a question independent of the usual axioms? (3) Show that a classical open question such as the Riemann hypothesis is independent of the usual axioms. (4) Should we take incompleteness seriously or is it a red herring? (5) Is mathematics quasi-empirical? In other words, should mathematics be done more like physics is done?
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program could be the Study of Intrinsic Limits to Knowledge. At least its acronym, SILK, would be pronounceable. There are many directions that such a program could take. For example, one of our meetings could take the form of a summer school, perhaps a two-week program in which a limited number of topics are discussed more in-depth, in the form of a series of lectures. The presence of graduate students could add significantly in generating new and fresh ideas for further explorations.
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References
1. Norman, A., 1993 Informational Society, An economic theory of discovery, invention and innovation, (Kluwer: Boston). 2. Norman, A., 1994, Risk, Uncertainty, and Complexity, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 18, 231 249. 3. Norman, A., 1994, Technology, Complexity and Consumer Choice, Manuscript in fight status with referees. 4. Norman, A., 1994, Computability, Complexity and Economics, Computational Economics, 7, 1 21.
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is also ones own subjective experience, within which certain orderly correlations lead one to posit external structures and processes (including the physical world and other persons). Perhaps the most fundamental limit to knowledge is this irreducible objective-subjective complementarity. After many centuries of trying, no one has convincingly identified any necessary connection between an objective world (or its particles, waves, or space-time curvatures) and the subjective qualia of, say, pains, odors, or colors (or why short wavelengths yield the subjective experience blue, long wavelengths red, and not the other way around). Can such limits ever be formalized?
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expunged, to make everything right again; something not rigorous enough, which had to be found and eradicated. Bertrand Russell, among others, argued that the fault lay in impredicative definitions; vicious circles, and developed an elaborate and murky theory of types to replace them with predicative but equivalent counterparts. This was taken yet further by Hilbert and his school of formalists, who argued that rigor lay entirely in syntax, and that the difficulties at the foundations of mathematics arose entirely from unextruded, semantic residues of meaning. For them, a mathematical term (e.g., triangle) was not to be allowed any vestige of meaning, rather, there were to be formal production rules for manipulating triangle from one proposition to another. This drastic extrusion of semantics constituted true rigor; mathematics itself would be suspect as long as there was any vestige of meaning or semantics left in it. Hilbert sought this kind of formalization of all of mathematics, the reduction of mathematics to algorithms or lists. It was this program which Gdels results killed. Let us briefly recount what these results actually mean. They mean that a constructive universe, finitely generated, consisting of pure syntax, is too poor to do mathematics in. They mean that semantics and impredicativities and meanings are essential to mathematics, they cannot be replaced by more syntactic rules and more lists or algorithms. They mean that mathematical systems are generically unformalizable; hence it is the formalizable ones which are the rare special cases, and not the other way around. They mean that identifying rigor with formalizability makes most of mathematics unreachable. I argue that biology teaches us the same is true about the material world. Roughly, that contemporary physics is to biology as number theory is to a formalization of it. Rather than an organism being just a standard material system plus a list of special conditions, an organism is rather a repository of meanings and impredicativities; more generic than an inorganic system rather than less. If this is so, then the Schrdinger question, and indeed biology itself, is not exclusively, or even mainly, an empirical science; empirics is to it as accounting is to number theory. If this is so, then organisms possess noncomputable, unformalizable models. Such systems are what I call complex. The world of these systems is much larger and more generic than the simple world we inherit from Reductionism. The main lesson from all this is that computability, in any sense, is not itself a Law of either Nature or of Mathematics. The noncomputability results, of which Gdels was perhaps the first and most celebrated, are indicative of the troubles which arise when we try to make it such.
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A larger issue concerns establishing a program of science, to replace the nonscientific microreductionistic philosophy of this century, which will give some basis for unifying our understanding of phenomena at all levels of complexity. Understanding a phenomenon has always been accomplished in physics only by deductively relating it to interactions between rather simple collective variables (a local reduction-and-synthesis). This certainly suggests that our understanding of more complex systems will be limited to some form of hierarchical relationships that the concepts of fundamental laws, or final theories, while possibly philosophically comforting or religiously engendered, have no scientific basis. As D. Boorstin noted: The great obstacle of man is the illusion of knowledge The great significance of the voyages of discovery was their discovery of ignorance.
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References
[1] L. Sklar, Physics and Chance. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993. [2] Note that the resulting sequences are algorithmically simple in the Chaitin-Kolmogorov sense. [3] D. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming. Ch. 3 Random Numbers. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1981. There is an especially interesting section about tests for randomness in short sequences. [4] A. M. Ferrenberg, D. P. Landau, and Y. J. Wong, Phys. Rev. Lett., 69, 3382 (1992). [5] See S. Havlin and D. Ben-Avraham, Adv. Phys., 36, 695 (1987) for a review.
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I noticed a tendency in our Workshop discussions and in these postings to invoke a particular mathematical model and to discuss undecidability or intractability for that model. An important issue is whether we can divorce unknowability of scientific questions from mathematical models. This suggests: Issue 1. Can we consider scientific questions separate from mathematical models in our studies? On the other hand, mathematical models are of interest in themselves. It seems to me that a mathematical model should satisfy the following twin desiderata: It should capture the essence of the scientific question (thats a scientific judgment). It should be computationally tractable. This observation can be used in two ways. The first is that if we can prove that there exist scientific questions such that every mathematical formulation is intractable in every setting (that is, no matter how much we weaken the assurance) then we have a means for establishing the existence of unanswerable questions. Thats a big If. Although computer scientists routinely consider all possible algorithms (including those already known and also those that may exist in principle) scientists and mathematicians do not consider all possible mathematical models that capture the essence of a scientific question. This leads me to propose: Issue 2. Can we fruitfully consider the notion of all mathematical models that capture the essence of a scientific question? The second way in which our observation about twin desiderata may be used is to provide guidance on model building. For example, a scientist should try to select a model and a question about that model which leads to a tractable computation.
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There is, of course, a long history of doing this; we often linearize nonlinear problems. What Im looking for are novel trade-offs between models and computational difficulty.
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APPENDIX
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Here is a related remark of Einsteins in his Autobiographical Notes in Paul Arthur Schilpps, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Volume VII of the Library of Living Philosophers, Open Court, 1949, p. 13: All concepts, even those which are closest to experience, are from the point of view of logic freely chosen conventions Let me finally remark that it is not surprising that the integers werent sacred to Einstein. Remember that special relativity challenged deeply held beliefs about the fundamental nature of space and time, beliefs that seemed as fundamental in physics as the integers are in mathematics.
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For more regarding these three worlds, see [2]. Ill discuss these worlds, in turn. Ill choose physics as my example of the real world. The laws of physics must, of course, be developed by physicists. It is my understanding that only a rather small number of physicists believe that space and/or time are ultimately discrete. (This group does include some major figures such as T. D. Lee). Furthermore, if space or time are discrete it is at scales many orders of magnitude smaller than Plancks constant. Mathematical models are conceived by physicists or applied mathematicians. There is, of course, considerable interest in discrete models such as cellular automata. However, I believe that continuous models, such as path integrals and differential equations, will continue to be important for at least the foreseeable future. Ill devote the remainder of this note to computational models. One chooses an abstraction of the computer called the Model of Computation. I will compare and contrast two abstractions: The Turing Machine and the Real Number Model. In the Real Number Model we use the abstraction that we can store real numbers and perform exact arithmetic on them at constant cost. The Turing Machine is typically used by people working on discrete problems while the Real Number Model is used by those working on continuous problems. The latter includes people working in information-based complexity as well as those using Blum-Shub-Smale machines. See [3] for further discussion. The choice of model in computation is important. The two models we have been discussing are not polynomially equivalent! I will list the pros and cons of these two models of computation followed by discussion.
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Turing Machine Model Pro: Con: Simple, robust Not predictive for scientific computation Real-Number Model Pro: Con: Natural for continuous mathematical models; predictive for scientific computation; utilizes the power of continuous mathematics Attractive to use finite-state model for finite-state machine
Ill now discuss these pros and cons. The attraction of the Turing machine is its simplicity. Furthermore, as is often pointed out, Turing Machine results are polynomially equivalent to those for any finite model. That is, they are robust. As already observed above, results are not polynomially equivalent to those of the Real- number model. A negative of Turing machines is that results, such as running times, are not predictive of scientific computation on real digital computers. Ill turn to the Real-number model. I believe it is natural to match the computer model to the mathematical model. Since the reals are used in continuous mathematical models, they should also be used in the computer model. Furthermore, the Real-number model is predictive for scientific computation. That is, modulo stability, computational complexity results in the real number model are the same as for the finite precision floating point numbers used in scientific computation. The final pro is that one has at hand the full power of continuous mathematics. Heres one example of the significance of that. There has been considerable interest in the physics community in the result that there exist differential equations with computable initial conditions and non-computable solutions. This follows from a theorem on ill-posed problems established by Pour-El and Richards. They use computability theory to establish their result and devote a large portion of a monograph, [4], to developing the mathematical underpinnings and to proving the theorem. An analogous result has been established using information-based complexity. The proof takes about one page; see [5]. More importantly, in information-based complexity, it is natural to consider the average case. It was recently shown that every ill-posed problem is well-posed on the average for every Gaussian measure. There is no corresponding result using computability theory. Finally, we state a negative for the Real Number Model. Since the digital computer is a finite state machine, it is attractive to match it with a finite model of computation. Much more can be said on this very interesting issue of the continuum but thats enough for this note.
Bibliography
[1] J. F. Traub, G. W. Wasilkowski, and H. Wozniakowski, Information-Based Complexity, Academic Press, 1988.
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[2] J. F. Traub and H. Wozniakowski, Theory and Applications of Information-Based Complexity, in 1990 Lectures in Complex Systems, Santa Fe Institute. Edited by Lynn Nadel and Daniel L. Stein, Addison-Wesley, 1991. [3] J. F. Traub and H. Wozniakowski, Information-Based Complexity: New Questions for Mathematicians, Mathematical Intelligencer, 13, 34 43 (1991). [4] M. B. Pour-El and J. I. Richards, Computability in Analysis and Physics, Springer Verlag, 1988. [5] A. G. Werschulz, What is the Complexity of Ill-Posed Problems?, Numer. Func. Anal. Optim., 9, 945 967 (1987). [6] J. F. Traub and A. G. Werschulz, Linear Ill-Posed Problems Are Solvable on the Average for All Gaussian Measures, Mathematical Intelligencer, 16, 42 48 (1994).
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On the basis of whats been sent to the Limits BBS over the past month or so, I think its worth examining each of these worlds in a lot more detail than has heretofore been the case, in an attempt to sort out and pin down more precisely some of the questions that people are asking in our Limits discussions. In particular, my feeling is that we have to be much more aware of the number systems available for use in these three worlds. This is primarily because for whatever psychological reasons, humans seem to be predisposed to use numbers to encode our observations and descriptions of each of the foregoing worlds. Thus, the character of what we can and cannot know or at least say about questions posed in these worlds generally rest on the assumptions we make about the kinds of number systems at our disposal to describe phenomena of interest.
Real Worlds
The key word describing these worlds of nature and human affairs is finiteness; in any real world, everything is finite measurements, lengths and durations. As a result, the only kinds of number systems we need to describe whats going on in any real world are finite systems, e.g., finite fields like Z mod p (p a prime) or even more primitive finite sets like 0, 1, 2, , 9. I have heard arguments to the effect that while it is certainly true that in practice we can only measure things in the real world to finite precision, any particular measurement could be in principle any real number. Let me offer several arguments against this line of reasoning: 1. This real-world-measurement context is just one of many in which the phrase in principle is completely meaningless. I would defy anyone to give a physically realizable procedure for measuring any real-world quantity that results in a real number. Furthermore, it is just not the case that the measurement of a physical quantity such as the length of the side of a room, or for that matter, the size of the universe can in principle be any real number. Since every physical quantity is finite, it necessarily follows that every such quantity is bounded; ergo, a measurement of that quantity is also bounded, which means that its value cannot be any real number even in principle.
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2. It seems to be part of the folk wisdom of the scientists, and especially the physicists, world view that assuming real numbers makes life easier somehow. Its hard to quarrel with three centuries of successes in physics that is to a great extent based on this assumption, although I might want to qualify the word success. But thats a topic for a whole new paper. So let me content myself here with simply pointing out that this assumption is equivalent to assuming an axiomatic framework for the measurement process that includes the Axiom of Choice, one of the most notorious logical pitfalls in all of mathematics. One can only wonder whether the benefits from this Axiom are worth the costs in potential paradoxes stemming from this Axiom (e.g., Banach-Tarski) that fly flat in the face of physical common sense. In this regard, its worth noting that assuming the reals, or equivalently the Axiom of Choice, is certainly an act that would raise the eyebrows of William of Ockham, since its a completely unnecessary assumption. As per point #1, you dont need an infinite set of numbers to describe the physical world, however convenient it might be for some mathematical purposes. So why trot out the blunderbuss of the reals when all you need to bag your quarry is the BB gun of a finite set? Note that Im not claiming that something like the Axiom of Choice necessarily leads to paradoxes in the physical world. Who knows if use of the Axiom of Choice will lead to reality paradoxes or not. All we can say for sure is that it leads to things like the BanachTarski paradox, which certainly does run counter to our physical intuition about the way of the world, as it seems to violate conservation of mass, among other things. (Just for the record, the B-T Paradox shows how you can cut up a sphere, say, into a finite number of pieces, and then re-assemble these pieces to form a new sphere whose radius is double that of the original.) So the Axiom of Choice might lead to a paradox, and I wonder why we should run such a completely unnecessary risk? 3. For a physicist, assuming an infinite set of numbers has its mathematical attractions. But were not talking about mathematical abstractions when were situated in the world of real phenomena; were talking about actual observations and measurements. And when it comes to asking if there are unanswerable questions relating to real-life, get-your-handsdirty observations and measurements, its a positive impediment to be saddled with something like the real numbers. There are many reasons for this, but the one that I feel is most germane to our Limits deliberations is simply that all statements made in a framework involving finite number fields are decidable; there cannot exist a Gdel-like theorem in this setting. Therefore, by restricting ourselves to finite sets of numbers for our measurements, we can safely ignore Gdelian notions of undecidability in our study of questions of unanswerability, which all then reduce to the problem of computational intractability.
Mathematical Worlds
These seem to be the only worlds in which just about all of us in the Limits teleconference can seem to agree, probably because in these worlds anything thats not logically forbidden eventually becomes necessary. So if you want continuity, infinite sets, random numbers, inherent stochasticity, times going to infinity or anything else, just snap your fingers, and presto! you can
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have it, as if by magic. Perhaps this is why so many of the Limits postings have been about one or another of these worlds: theyre easy, since you can make them up as you go along, dispensing whatever properties you like as conditions, needs and wishes dictate. Anyway, they are not the focus of this missive, so Ill pass over them in silence.
Computational Worlds
The worlds of computation occupy the curious position of having a foot in both the real and the mathematical worlds. When we talk about carrying out an actual calculation on a physical device (e.g., fingers, abacus, slide rule or computing machine (digital or analog)), were talking about the real world. And in that case, all the restrictions noted above apply to any such computations. On the other hand, when we talk about a model of computation (e.g., a Turing machine or a BSS machine), then both our feet are planted firmly in the world of mathematics. Such models are mathematical theories of computation, and as such they may or may not bear any resemblance to real-world computational processes. What this means, of course, is that the kind of restrictions on what can be done with, say, a Turing machine, may or may not be relevant to what can be done with a Connection Machine 5 or a SPARC workstation. And, as noted above, it is the limitations on real computation that ultimately dictate the questions that we can or cannot answer about the real world. Passing through any of the mathematical worlds including those consisting of models of computation can be at best only a waystation on the journey to understanding what we can possibly know about a given real-world process.
In Conclusion
I strongly suspect that theres very little in this didactic cri de coeur that were not all intimately familiar with, at least implicitly. Nevertheless, I hope that the points raised above help focus our attention more explicitly on some of the issues that well have to grapple with in coming to terms with Limits. Each of the three classes of worlds real, mathematical, computational has its own characteristic set of problems, and its certainly not my intention to suggest here that any particular set is unworthy of serious investigation. Quite the contrary, in fact. But it IS my intention to suggest that: (1) we keep uppermost in mind the particular world were talking about when we make pronouncements about what can and cannot be known in a given area, and (2) we focus a disproportionate amount of our energies on the interfaces between these very different worlds. To my eye, there has been way too much implicit wishful thinking in many of the Limits postings, to the effect that work in the worlds of mathematics and/or theoretical computation has something relevant to say about whats happening in what I called above the Real World. Maybe (even probably) it does. But if so, Id like to see an explicit chain of reasoning establishing that fit. Im sorry to say that its just not good enough to believe or feel that theres a connection; you have to actually prove it! So, in my view the tone of our deliberations will be greatly elevated by making a more careful distinction between the map and the territory, which, in turn, will lead to an on-going interchange generating at least a bit more light than heat.
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