
Form and Content in Computer Science (1970) - dedalus
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/TuringLecture/TuringLecture.html
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ScottBurson
Section 2.2 is particularly interesting to me. Marvin said (in the last
paragraph of the section),

 _There is no practical consequence to the fact that the program-reduction
problem is recursively unsolvable, in general. In any case, one would expect
programs eventually to go far beyond human ability in this activity_

The first sentence is ridiculous as stated -- here it is 47 years later, and
we still have nothing like the automated program-transformation system Marvin
envisioned, and uncomputability has to be considered a major reason for that
-- but nonetheless, I share his intuition that this barrier "should", in some
sense, be surmountable. After all, as he goes on to point out, we humans do
manage, albeit with considerable effort and many mistakes, to write programs
that are at least correct and efficient _enough_ to be usable. It seems there
should be _some_ way to characterize the mental processes by which we do that
well enough that we could program a computer to do the same thing -- and even
to do it better than we can, as Marvin suggests. Yet this has turned out to be
one of the most difficult problems in AI. I don't even know that one could say
that much progress has been made since Marvin gave this talk.

